The Last of the Time Lords
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: AU. From my drabbles - Last of the Time lords shows Romana, instead of the Doctor, as the last ' remaining ' Time Lord, travelling through the universe with Martha Jones. When the time travellers travel to the future, they find the truth is far different than it seems... Rated M for mature situations.
1. Chapter 1

I've had this idea in my head for a Lonnnng time! As always reviews are appreciated, and I don't own Doctor Who.

**The Last of the Time Lords.**

**The End of the Universe.**

" Cardiff!" Romana announced when the TARDIS materialised with a thump.

Martha Jones, Romana's present human companion, repeated the word in disbelief. " Cardiff?

Romana, now in her fifth incarnation, smirked at Martha, enjoying her human companion's surprise, not at all dismayed that she was being incredibly slow, but then again she was human, and they rarely thought outside the box, particularly the ones who applied themselves to one field of knowledge. It was pathetically simple to surprise Martha, and whilst Romana liked her, liked her a lot, she did find Martha's comparative slowness to new horizons annoying. Romana was a tall thin woman, with long dark hair in a ponytail, blue eyes, wearing a simple shirt and jacket, and black slacks and boots. " Ah," she said infuriatingly, " Cardiff's actually built on a rift in time and space, like California on the San Andreas Faults. The rift in this case bleeds energy, energy the TARDIS needs for fuel. You didn't think I use unleaded nuclear fuels to travel, did you?" Romana walked around the TARDIS controls, adjusting them to absorb the flow of temporal energy. A Mark 5 TARDIS, this was the last example of Time Lord technology in the universe, just as she was the Last of the Time Lords. The TARDIS console was shaped in a traditional hexagonal shape with neatly laid out controls and displays with the time rotor, glowing a warm green colour, in the centre. The thought of the TARDIS and herself as the last examples of their races filled Romana's hearts with sorrow. She remembered how her First incarnation had believed the Time Lords to be indestructible, and how her third incarnation had set out to prove it, only to find herself way out of her league when the Time War had begun in earnest. Then there was...him...the best thing she'd ever known in her lives.

" Shouldn't take long," she said to Martha to take her mind off the past, " Just a couple of minutes." Romana looked up curiously, studying the readings from the scanner. The readings were way off. " The rifts been active." She added thoughtfully.

Romana was curious about why the rift was active, it had been as calm as a pond when she'd last been here. She was tempted to leave the TARDIS after she'd refueled her, but she decided to wait for the time being before making her decision. The thought of Earth culture and some good old fashioned tea came to mind. Martha's voice broke in on her thoughts as she realised something herself. " Hold on, they had an earthquake in Cardiff a couple of years ago. Was that you?"

Romana smirked as she remembered Blon Fel Fotch Passameer Day Slitheen, how the rift had nearly torn the TARDIS apart and she'd been regressed to her childhood. The memory also brought uncomfortable memories of Rose Tyler, who never learnt anything about the dangers of space time travel, and later ripped open the TARDIS when her fourth self tried to destroy the Daleks. Memories of her regeneration, then her recovery and the mess with the Sycorax invasion came to mind. Everything leads to another. Romana thought to herself about the way she'd been after the war. She'd been a basket case, barely able to pull herself together, for the first and only time she felt alone, cut off from her people. It had taken a lot of effort for her to recover, and in that time she'd repaired the TARDIS, and started looking for other Time Lords. There was always the chance someone may've survived, albeit in a chameleon fob watch, and was just waiting. But after a few desperate, agonising years of nothing, Romana had given up, and slowly accepted the horrible truth. She was the Last of the Time Lords. There was no one else. Romana had been willing to accept travelling alone, then she met Rose, then Adam Mitchell the little bastard who hadn't lasted long after his little stunt to try and change history, then Jack Harkness. The thought of Jack and what had happened to him made her hearts clench with guilt. Then Rose had gone and made her regenerate when she stupidly took in the Time Vortex, and then Martha...Martha was someone that Romana could easily see as someone her first life had been like. Martha, whilst intelligent and good company, could sometimes get on the Time Lady's nerves because she couldn't stop pushing things into a humans's point of view, and would inevitably stumble because something was beyond her comprehension. Martha did make the effort, Romana had to admit that, she only hoped the human would accept not everything had an equivalent in Time Lord terms. Romana snorted as she remembered how, one night, Martha had made her try and explain the TARDIS and how she worked. Martha left with her brain trickling out, and Romana smirking her pants off.

" Bit of trouble with the Slitheen, nothing I couldn't handle. Long time ago," Romana added, coming back to reality, hoping her offhandedness was putting Martha off asking stupid questions. " Lifetimes." She added, becoming uncomfortably nostalgic. " I was a different girl then." She added, tugging on her ponytail, remembering her fourth selfs short hair, walking around the puzzled Martha.

A few moments later, Romana straightened out examining the readings. " Finished, all fired up and ready to go," Romana stopped. The scanner screen was showing a familiar man rushing towards the TARDIS, a man wearing a long, navy blue overcoat that looked like it came from World War 2, running towards the TARDIS.

Romana's time senses froze as she saw how time flowed around him. It was Jack Harkness. Swallowing, she dematerialised the TARDIS, trying to get away from her friend who'd become immortal...The TARDIS jolted, and then the sound of the time rotor sped up as the TARDIS accelerated into the future. The jolt had thrown Romana and Martha to their feet, and they struggled to get up in the bucking TARDIS.

" What was that?" Martha asked before she screamed when sparks rained down on them. Romana somehow managed to keep her balance, even as the TARDIS seemed to threaten to shake herself to pieces. She managed to grab with one hand the scanner, pulling it round into her line of sight. The yearometer reading was flashing before her eyes, the numbers changing and increasing with each blink, and it was so fast even Romana had trouble following it.

" We're accelerating into the future. The year 1 billion. Five billion. Five trillion. Fifty trillion? What?" Romana gasped in astonishment; never had any TARDIS in history travelled so far into the future. Under normal conditions, the TARDIS should just glide there, but in this case it was like being inside a barrel going over niagra falls. Romana's astonishment grew, as did her apprehension. " The year 100 trillion? Impossible."

" Why? What happens then?" Martha asked, her voice showing excitement at the prospect of seeing another point in time, but also apprehension; she could tell that Romana was astonished by the turn of events, and the year meant nothing to her.

Romana wanted to deny it, but the Time Lady knew she couldn't. Turning to Martha, she uttered the words she'd never expected to say to anyone since the Time War had ended. " We're going to the end of the universe."

The TARDIS rematerialised, landing with a jolt. Romana and Martha straightened out. " We've landed." Romana said. She knew she was stating the obvious, but the Time lady didn't know what else to say, not after a journey like that.

" So what's out there?" Martha asked, her voice in a whisper of pent up excitement.

" I don't know."

Romana had answered honestly. The Time Lords had taken superficial observations from their own time, but they'd never actually bothered to send any expedition into the future to find out what was happening, and what would happen. Privately Romana believed the Time Lords, so frightened of change, and any kind of change threatening their dominion over time, were terrified that one day they would find the universe collapsing all around them. There were theories across the whole universe about the way the universe would eventually collapse, but no one had come here to check.

Martha chortled, knowing that Romana was uneasy but not understanding the reasoning behind it. " Say that again. That's rare." She said with a smirk.

Romana turned her ice queen stare on Martha, freezing the girl with a start and the smirk fell off her face as easily as paint to a heat ray, and Romana watched as Martha went from amused to painfully uncomfortable; all of her incarnations had possessed the ice queen mentality of the first Romana, and it had never changed since. Oh, the other Romanas may have different stares, but the end result was the same.

" I'm serious. Not even the Time Lords came this far." Romana nodded decisively, " We should leave. We should go, really, really go." Then her eyes met Martha's, and she smiled before running over to the doors, grabbing her long coat as she did.

Romana had been to many places, materialised in places that looked uninviting, but there was always life there, and the knowledge there was life elsewhere in the universe. The End of the universe on the other hand was the opposite. The TARDIS had landed in a rocky valley in the pitch black, but there was no light in the sky signifying stars, and the ground might have been ash. There were a few plants, but they looked like they were dead already. Romana looked around straightening her coat, trying to get her bearings before looking back at the TARDIS. Shaped like a London 1960s police telephone box, the TARDIS chameleon circuit had been programmed to land like that. Romana had done it to remember her best friend, whom she was sure had died in the Time War. When Martha stepped out and closed the door, she looked around before she cried, " Oh, my god." Running towards a man on the ground. Romana followed behind her, slowing down in nausea as she saw who it was. Martha checked his throat, feeling for his pulse. " Can't get a pulse. Hold on, you've got that medical kit thing." Martha got up and ran into the TARDIS. Romana followed her run out of the corner of her eye. Medical kit thing? She thought irritably. Can't you humans ever stop adding the word thing to what you do not understand? The medical kit in question was one of the most advanced pieces of technology in the universe, and the last examples of an almost extinct species. Martha should have more respect for them.

Romana moved closer to the body, shaking herself out of her irritated thoughts, and started looking down into the face of her old friend, wishing they'd never separated on these circumstances.

" Hello again. Oh, I'm sorry." She added the last part because it was true.

The TARDIS door banged open, and Martha shot out, pushing Romana out of the way. " Here we go. Get out of the way."

As Martha got down to examine him, she took out a stethescope and tried to get a heartbeat. " It's a bit odd, though, not very 100 trillion. That coat's more like World War 2."

" He came with us."

" How do you mean? From Earth?"

Romana looked speculatively at the outer shell of the TARDIS before looking back at Martha and the man she was tending. " He must've clung onto the outer shell of the TARDIS." Romana shook her head, amazed that he would do something so stupid since he knew the possible dangers. " All the way through the vortex. That's very him." She shrugged.

Martha took the stethoscope out of her ears, looking up at the Time lady curiously, " What, do you know him?"

Romana nodded, not even denying it, how could she after this attempt at suicidal stupidity. " Friend of mine. Used to travel with me."

Martha looked down at the still face and body, seeing how gorgeous this guy was. " But he's...I'm sorry, there's no heartbeat. There's nothing. He'd dead."

As if on cue, like there was a god in the universe left that wanted to prove Martha Jones wrong, the man suddenly gasped loudly, grabbing onto Martha, who screamed in shock. " Oh, so much for me. It's all right, just breathe deep. I've got you." Martha said, sending the last part to the handsome stranger.

The man smiled roguishly, and Romana closed her eyes briefly. " Captain Jack Harkness. And who are you?" He added, stroking Martha's chin. Martha flushed, and smiled automatically. " Martha Jones."

Jack's smile grew bigger. " Nice to meet you, Martha Jones."

That's it, Romana thought. " Oh, please. Don't start."

Jack sighed, the flirting over. Romana had never been fooled by Jack, she was immune from Jack's flirtatiousness.

" I was only saying hello." He protested exasperatedly, and Martha realised that this sort of thing must happen between them occassionally, and she wondered how this guy knew the cool and aloof but kind Time Lady.

" I don't mind," She said looking into Romana's cool, but amused face.

With Martha's help Jack stood up, and Romana saw he was wearing a backpack. Some mattress to wake up on. For a while both of them didn't say a word, until Jack said. " Romana."

" Captain."

" Good to see you."

Inwardly Jack cursed himself. He'd waited for decades to meet Romana again, and that was the best thing he could say to her?

Romana smirked, " And you, same as ever. Have you had work done?"

" You can talk." Jack retorted, gazing over Romana's new appearance, but he knew that if he started flirting then the Time lady would just shake her head, roll her eyes and walk away and ignore him completely.

" Regeneration." Romana said briefly not bothering to go into too much detail. It was in the past, literally, and it didn't matter much now. " How did you know this was me?" She asked pointing at herself, eyes fixing Jack with a questioning stare.

Jack gestured towards the TARDIS, not commenting on her new appearance, but Romana was not surprised. The Time Agency had probably encountered species that had properties that were similar to regeneration, or Jack had heard something on his own travels about Time lords, either way he didn't ask and she wasn't in the mood to give a lecture on Time Lord biology. " The police box sorta gives it away. I've been following you for a long time. You abandoned me."

If Jack was hoping for an explanation he was disappointed. Romana's face, totally deadpan and in full ice queen mode, said simply, " Did I? Sorry, busy life, moving on."

Jack wasn't satisfied, but he knew the previous Romana well enough to know she wasn't going to answer straight away, so he changed the subject. " I just got to ask. The Battle of Canary Wharf. I saw the list of the dead. It said Rose Tyler."

Romana had been wondering when Rose would crop up, but luckily she had good news. She'd known that sooner or later she would need to meet Jack, and then the reasons behind her abandonment of him would come out, but she would tell him.

" Oh, no. She's alive."

" You're kidding!" For a moment Jack was afraid that Romana had done something to make Rose hide, but she wasn't that cruel.

Romana nodded, a smile on her face. " Parallel universe, safe and sound. With Mickey, and her mother."

After a hug celebrating Rose's safety, Romana reluctantly hugging back was something Jack and Martha definitely noticed, the trio left the area of the TARDIS, trudging into the distance. Since they didn't know where they were, they had no destination in mind, so they were wandering aimlessly. Romana was looking around, soaking up everything she was seeing, but all she was seeing was death and decay. The universe was collapsing, and there were probably very few races or planets left in the universe, but if there were any then they were dead, leaving only basic life, but that too would die out eventually.

As they walked, Jack was telling Martha what was happening, bitterness in his voice. " So there I was, stranded in the year 200,100, ankle deep in Dalek dust, and she goes off without me, but I had this." He said, looking pointedly at Romana's back with a look that could freeze molten lava, then he cheered up, and showed off his wrist strap. " I used to be a Time agent. It's called a vortex manipulator. She's not the only one who can time travel."

Romana took offence to that, feeling her Time lord pride rise up to defend their honour in the face of one of the most crudest and most hazardous time travel methods in existence. " Oh, please. That's not time travel." Smugness seeped into her voice as she remarked. " It's like I've got a sports car, and you Jack, ended up with a space hopper."

Martha laughed.

Jack didn't find it funny as he admitted, " Okay, so I bounced. I thought 21st century, best place to find Romana, except I got it wrong." He tapped the manipulator again. " This thing burnt out, so its useless."

Romana couldn't resist smirking, " Told you." She chirped.

Jack's exasperation broke out at that, " I had to live through the entire 20th century waiting for a version of you that would coincide with me."

That would've been tricky. In all her travels, Earth had never been the chosen spot for her landings, and her first and second incarnations had never truly been on Earth frequently enough aside from visits that were nowhere near Cardiff, unless Jack felt like a walk to Brighton, or even to Paris, and then she spent the majority of her 2nd incarnation in E space before returning home. Her third incarnation had spent her entire life on Gallifrey, preparing for the Time War. Her fourth life had been short, and her fifth life rarely arrived on Earth long enough for anyone to notice. But Romana was stunned by the massive undertaking Jack had gone through, and for so long.

Martha worked something out along the lines Romana's own thoughts were going through. " But that makes you more than 100 years old." She said, looking at Jack like she was afraid she was wrong.

" And looking good, don't you think?" Jack chuckled falsely; clearly he was as unhappy about his longevity as Romana was sometimes; it was painful knowing that she was going to spend the rest of her life, all of her future lives alone and she had many more of them left, with no Time Lord presence in her head to keep her from going insane. It was unfair, she was the last of her kind, and she was destined to go through her remaining lives, all 8 of them, and she would never hear another Time lord again. Jack was moaning about it, but at least he had a species, and it was a miracle humans didn't hear themselves inside their minds the way Romana did, otherwise they'd go as mad as she sometimes did when she fell into depression at hearing nothing. Jack carried on, " So, I went back to the time rift, based myself there, ' cause I knew you'd come back to refuel, until finally, I get a signal on this detecting you and here we are." here Jack pointed at his backpack with his thumb, furthering Romana's curiosity about what was inside it, and wondering how he would know she would even arrive in Cardiff in the first place at a certain time. The TARDIS could last on a refuel from a temporal rift for a number of years, depending on the purity of the energy, and as long as the TARDIS didn't overexert itself in travelling.

Martha had her own questions. " But the thing is, how come you left him behind, Romana?"

Romana really didn't want to get into this conversation just then, not until she was ready. She was still coming to terms with her own actions as it was.

" I was busy." She replied, but she winced as she realised that Martha wasn't going to stop prodding, and with Jack being bitter, Romana was going to have to answer some very nasty questions she didn't even want to contemplate.

Martha's voice became accusing, not helped by Jack's own pointed stare. " Is that what happens, though, seriously? You just get bored of us one day and disappear?"

Jack's voice was also bitter, " Not if your blonde."

" Oh, she was blonde! What a surprise!"

That was it, Romana's patience snapped, but not for Rose. She wanted to stop this foolishness before it got out of hand. " ENOUGH! Alright, you want to know, do you? No, Martha, you're the fourth person I've travelled with that was human. Rose, a guy called Adam, who I did drop home because he tried changing history, Jack, and yourself. I don't get bored of you, you get bored of travel with me. I speak from another friends experiences."

Jack remembered her stories of a Time lord who'd shown her the universe, but Romana had said he was dead. He suddenly felt bad, it grew worse.

" Jack," she said turning to him, pity in her eyes. " I left you because you're immortal. You can't die, and that's wrong. I'm barely holding back my disgust at seeing time freeze around you. To a Time lord, you're a freak." Without another word, she left the two gawping humans.

The trio stepped close to what looked like a chasm. What looked like roads, windows or doors, were carved, or sculptured into the rocky walls, was a city. It was all dead, of course.

" Is that a city?"

Romana nodded in agreement, " City or a hive or a nest. Or a conglomeration. Like it was grown. But look," she pointed at the roads. " There, that like, pathways or roads. There must've been life here, some sort of life anyway."

Martha whispered, unable to believe that something could kill an entire city, clearly forgetting New, New York. " What killed it?"

Romana's answer was simple, and yet succinct. " Time, the greatest destroyer." It was strange, hearing a Time lady say those words, that expression, and Romana, used to seeing life wherever she went, couldn't describe how empty she felt just looking at this future. Everything's dying now. The great civilisations have died out." Romana looked up, pointing at the empty night sky. " This isn't just night. All the stars have burnt up, faded away. Nothing, no solar systems, no red giants...nothing."

" They must have an atmospheric shell. We should be frozen to death." Jack said, also looking around before he twisted his head round to face Romana.

Still looking up at the sky, Romana considered what Jack had said. It was more than likely that worlds like that would probably be long since dead, and worlds with life still trying to cling to survival as it shook itself free, then it made the chances of life more realistic. Then again, maybe the atmospheric shell had been thrown over this world, and there was no life here except for the three time travellers.

" Martha and I, maybe. Not so sure about you Jack." Romana looked into Jack's eyes, holding them for a good minute before looking down to gaze on the city in front of them, not really caring about the jab at his immortality. " But what about the people?" Martha asked." Does no one survive?"

" I suppose we have to hope life will find a way." Romana replied.

Jack pointed downwards, down towards a figure who was running away from a band of others, who looked vaguelly human but more savage. They were crying out, " Human!"

" Is it me, or is that a hunt? Come on!" Romana shouted, rushing down towards the man they saw. As they ran, Romana vaguely heard Jack say, " Oh, I've missed this!"

Romana, Jack and Martha were running towards the man, and he was rushing to them, the creatures behind him. When they met, Romana could see the man was on the point of collapse, and was sweating profusely and he was running on pure adrenaline. Jack reached out, " I've got you. I've got you."

The man, with an unshaven face and a thin form, shook his head, breathless and gasping in relief at the stop, gasped out." We've got to run. They're coming!"

As if on cue, the people following came closer, waving torches. As they got nearer, Romana saw that they were either tatooed, pierced with studs, or were tatooed like their leader was, but they all had sharp teeth and a hungry look in their faces, almost animalistic.

Jack unholstered something, and Romana saw a gun. Unlike another Time Lord she could name, Romana didn't mind weapons but she didn't like them used. Besides, pacifism wasn't going to save them. Still holding on to the man with one hand, her other hand reached into her jacket pocket, and she pulled out her sonic screwdriver and pointed it at them. The sonic screwdriver emitted a massive sonic boom that echoed throughout the near airless place, and sent the savages reeling backwards. Jack took aim with his gun, and shot at two of them who dropped.

Martha too had gotten a good look at them, stunned by their savagery. " What the hell are they?" No one answered her, the man was too tired to speak, and Romana and Jack had never heard of them. Finally the man shook himself out of his stupor to say, " There's more of them. We've got to keep going."

Romana hoped she had the answer. " I've got a ship nearby. It's safe. It's not far. It's over there." She turned her head, only to see a band of the savages running from that direction, cutting them off from the TARDIS. " Maybe not." Romana said.

The man said just as the grinning tatooed form of the savage leader came closer, practically licking his lips in hunger. " We're close to the silo. If we get to the silo, then we're safe."

" Silo?"

Jack said decisively, " Silo."

" Silo for me." Martha held up her hand.

They set off running in the direction the man was running in before he cannoned into Jack. They were followed closely by the savages, and they could hear their yells and screams as they followed.

Finally they came to a road that lead down to a set of gates and fences with searchlights on them. The man shouted breathlessly at the men guarding the perimeter. " It's the futurekind, they're coming! Open the gate!"

The guards held up their weapons, and one called out, " Show me your teeth!"

Romana looked back, the so called futurekind was gaining rapidly on them.

The guard repeated his order, " Show me your teeth! Show me your teeth!"

The man they'd helped said to the three time travellers, " Show him your teeth!" Jack gritted his teeth together, followed closely by Martha and Romana. The guard nodded, shouting, " Human! Let them in! Let them in!"

The futurekind were gaining on them. The gates opened, and as they got through, the same guard repeated, " Close! Close!"

Through the gates, one of the guards fired his weapon, stopping the futurekind in their tracks. The leader spoke in a grunting, gravelly voice, moving from side to side like he was drunk or hyped up. " Humans. Humani. Make feast."

The guards voice was like steel, " Go back to where you came from." Romana could see he was on edge, and one provocation from the leader would see his body ripped apart by bullets. The leader and his people were either stubborn or stupid as they came nearer. " I said go back! Back!" He held up his gun, pointing it directly into the face of the leader.

" Kind want you." The leader said. " Kind hungry." The leader then seemed to give up, and he threw his hands back, waving the guards away. They walked away from the gates. The lead guard turned to face the people he'd let in. " Thanks for that." Romana told him.

The guard nodded briskly, clearly used to doing what he'd just done. " Right, lets get you inside them." The man they'd helped fell into step next to the guard. " My name's Padra Fet Shafe Cane. Tell me, just tell me. Can you take me to Utopia?"

The guard nodded, " Oh, yes, sir. Yes, I can."

* * *

Romana and her friends had introduced themselves, and Romana had said she was a scientist. Now she was trying to wrangle for the TARDIS to be brought into the silo. It was quite like an old missile base on Earth, and all the people here looked as hagard as Padra.

" It's like a box, a big blue box." She was saying to the lieutenant, the man in charge it seemed. " I'm sorry, but I really need it back. It's stuck out there." The lieutenant made his assurances, and tried to get away, but Padra had his own concerns. " I'm sorry, but my family were heading for the silo. Did they get here?" He looked around himself desperately. " My mother is Kistane Shafe Cane. My brother's name is Beltone."

The lieutenant said apologetically, " The computers are down, but you can check the paperwork. Creet!" He called. A little head peeped out, a little boy with long curly fair hair, looking at the lieutenant curiously. " Passenger needs help."

The boy came out, carrying a clipboard. " Right, what do you need?" he asked with the same professionalism as a man twice his age.

Padra hurried over, bending down to check the board.

The lieutenant turned to face Romana, curiously. " A blue box, you said?"

Romana sighed. It was always remarkably difficult to explain a TARDIS away to a non Time Lord. " Yes, big, tall, wooden, says police on it. You can't miss it."

The liutenant could see he wasn't going to get anything else, so he said. " We're driving out for the last later collection. I'll see what we can do."

" Thank you." Romana replied in relief as the lieutenant left, but she'd seen something in his eyes, like recognition...

Meanwhile the boy and Padra came up from their debate about where the rest of Padra's family was. " Come on."

As they left, Romana the others followed; they needed to know the layout of the place, and when better then now?

Martha, who couldn't believe that a little boy could handle paperwork, just couldn't resist. " Sorry, but how old are you?"

The boy, Creet shrugged, either because he didn't know or because he thought the question was dumb. " Old enough to work. This way."

As they walked deeper into the silo, Romana thought about the shantytowns she'd seen on her travels. They'd been like a palace compared to them. Everyone was cramped together in groups, clearly families. Creet was shouting, " Kistane Shafe Cane. Kistane and Beltone Shafe Cane. I'm looking for a Kistane and Beltone Shafe Cane"

Padra added, " The Shafe Canes, anyone?"

" Anyone?" Asked Creet, before calling out. " Kistane and Beltone Shafe Cane. Anyone know the Shafe Cane family? Anyone called Shafe Cane?"

" It's like a refugee camp." Martha remarked.

Jack couldn't help but comment, leaving out his brain as always in Romana's opinion. " Stinking. Sorry. No offence. Not you." he added apologetically at a couple as they walked past.

Romana chortled. " You see, humans. The ripe old smell of humans. You survived. Oh, you might have spent a million years evolving into a cloud of gas and another million as downloads, but you always revert to the same basic shape. The fundamental human."

Creet called out again, " Kistane Shafe Cane. Is there a Kistane Shafe Cane?"

Finally, a woman's voice said, " That's me."

Padra called out, " Mother!"

The woman gasped, then rushed towards them, crying, " Oh, my god!" Romana and Martha watched the happy reunion with a smile before Romana took out her sonic screwdriver and starting to pick the lock of a bulkhead she'd seen. It seemed that family love had survived, afterall. Jack, on the other hand, had walked over to a man, and said in his usual style, " Captain Jack Harkness. And who are you?"

Romana's voice cracked like a whip, " Stop it. Give me a hand with this."

Jack hurried over to where Romana was, and she'd given up when Jack appeared. " It's half deadlocked," she told him patting the door, " see if you can override the code." Romana and Jack went to work on the door, " Let's find out where we are."

Suddenly the door slide open, and Romana almost went flying in surprise when she realised she was standing on the edge of a silo. " Whoa!" Jack said, hands shooting out and grabbing her before she fell to her death.

" I've got you," Jack said.

Romana nodded, " Thanks." And she meant it.

Jack smiled wryly, " How did you cope without me?"

Martha gaped with awe, " Now that is what I call a rocket."

Towering over them, and going down Omega knew how far down, the rocket was massive. Connected to the rocket were walkways, thin and narrow paths meant for single file inside. Romana scrutinised the rocket. It's outer hull looked like some parts of it were old and rusted, yellowy, but blue in some places, like the ship had been made from scrap. That wasn't difficult, there were some races that did that, or had, as the case may be.

" They're not refugees, you were wrong Martha," Romana said in realisation, joining the clues together. " They're passengers."

Martha remembered what Padra had said to the guard the let them in, " He said they were going to Utopia."

Still looking up at the rocket, Romana commented, " The perfect place. 100 trillion years and its the same old dream." If it was a dream then where did the rocket come from? Looking down, Romana scrutinised the engines. They looked different from what she recognised about rocket design. " Do you recognise those engines?" She asked Jack.

Jack scrutinised them himself, running the design through what he himself knew about rocket technology before he shook his head. " Nope, whatever it is, it's not rocket science. But it's hot though."

Romana sniffed the air. He was right. It was quite hot, too hot. If it was a chemical rocket then the exhaust would turn them to crisp. " Boiling," she agreed. Romana pulled her upper body out of the doorway, deciding they'd seen enough. Jack worked on the door panel to lock it again, like they weren't even inside.

" If the universe is falling apart, what does Utopia mean?" Romana asked curiously.

At that moment, a tall lanky man with short close cropped brown hair appeared. He had a big nose, and big ears. He came over with a smile on his face. Romana took in his dress; Edwardian costume, with a waistcoat and a cravat. He looked hopefully at Martha, " Romana? The scientist I've heard about." He spoke with a Northern accent.

Romana held up her hand, drawing his attention, " That's me." She replied, wondering what the significance was.

The strange man grinned at her, and grabbed her hand before the shaken Romana could do anything about it, pumping it and crying, " Good! Good! Good!" then dragging her by the hand, the man started running, crying " Good."

Romana turned her head to face the others, who were running behind them, somewhat confused, and she said, " It's good, apparently."

The man lead them inside what looked like a laboratory, jam packed with all sorts of junk that looked like it should all be at a tip, but Romana knew better than to say that. The man lead Romana to a piece of equipment, and started jabbering. " This is the gravitissimal accelerator. It's past its best, but it works."

Then he rushed over to point to another bank of equipment, " And over here is the Footprint impeller system. Do you know anything about end-time gravity mechanics?"

Romana frowned, temporal mechanics at the most basic never changed, although the end of the universe predicted changes to gravitational anomalies. From her perspective it was hypothetical, since Time Lords never bothered to gather any knowledge at this point in time, so her knowledge of temporal mechanics was purely academic. " I know one or two points," she replied calmly, but slowly.

The man gestured hopelessly at it, " I can't get it to harmonise properly. "

Romana nodded, looking over the equipment. " And this feeds into the rocket?"

The man nodded. " Yes, except without a stable footprint, we'll never reach escape velocity." Romana had heard of propulsion systems that used gravity to push an object into escape velocity, the tricky thing was that planetary gravity meant that the system would need to have a good degree of stability. The man carried on, " If only we could harmonise the five impact patterns," Romana frowned even more; this system wasn't making any sense to her, and she was a Time lady with years of experience in strange technologies. She'd never heard of a five impact pattern before. " and unify them, well might yet make it." He finished, looking and speaking hopefully at the system, like there was a solution but he couldn't find it yet. " What do you think, Romana? Any ideas?"

Romana looked at the equipment, seeing the hopeful face of the man in front of her, before she shook her head, feeling sorry for him and annoyed she couldn't find anything to add. " Well, not a clue." She said apologetically, looking sheepish.

The man frowned, looking like a little boy that had been told Santa wasn't real, " Nothing?"

Romana carried on, " I'm not from round these parts. I've never seen a system like this before. I'm sorry." She added again, seeing the man's sadness. It was like the universe had fallen on his shoulders the way he hunched over.

The man hastened to say it wasn't her fault. " No, no, I'm sorry. It's my fault. There's been so little help..."

Martha had opened Jack's backpack, which had been placed on the ground next to a table, and she'd taken out a jar with a hand inside it. " Oh, my god." She said, looking like she'd come face to face with Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, and considering what was inside the jar, Romana couldn't say she blamed her. She put the hand on the table, saying to Jack. " You've got a hand. A hand in a jar. A hand, in a jar, in your bag."

Romana and the strange man came over, Romana sitting down so then she could peer more closely at the hand. At first she was looking at it bizarely, when she saw a mole on it, a mole she knew...because it was identical to one she had on her own hand! She checked her hand, and saw it, comparing the two together, and saw the fingerspan of the hand in the jar, and the one she had. Identical.

She looked at Jack. " That's mine! Where did you get it?"

" I did say I had a Romana detector." Jack replied.

Romana shook her head in disbelief. " Where the hell did you get it? What, were you standing beneath that bloody Sycorax ship or something?"

Martha put her hands on hips, " What do you mean, that's your hand? You've got both your hands, I can see them."

Romana sighed, " Long story. I lost my hand, Christmas day in a swordfight. I regrew it." Romana's expression darkened as she remembered fighting the Sycorax leader with swords, and she'd been knocked down, and the bastard had sliced her hand when she was disorientated. Looking at the hand brought back the memory of the flash of pain, then nothing.

" You regrew it?"

Romana smiled, enjoying rattling Martha's cage, " Yes, I did. Hello!" She mockingly waved at Martha.

The man looked at her curiously. " Might I ask, what species are you?"

Romana wasn't offended with the question. " Time Lord. Last of." When the man looked like he didn't know what that meant. " Heard of them?" No. " Not even a legend, or even a myth?" Romana sighed. So much for the Time lords being infinite. Even here they were forgotten, but that was to be expected since when they'd even been around before the war they had been only spoken of in tales. It was still disappointing.

Romana changed the subject, " Sorry, but where are we. We arrived here by...accident."

The man didn't seem offended. " Malcassiro. The homeworld of the Malmooth. That city outside was theirs, the conglomeration. Before it died, and so did they, all except one of my assisants, Chan Tho, who's working with my other assistant, Magister on the footprint mechanism downstairs," his voice dropped in sadness. Clearly he'd known some of them, and was sad that none had survived. " Then we took refuge here."

Martha was still looking at the hand. " You grew another hand."

Oh, get over it. Romana thought angrily, starting to lose her patience with Martha. You constantly regrow your skin, blood and hair, now that's annoying, finding all those hairs in the bath, like we've got a very hairy cat.

" It only happens under weird conditions. Its still my hand." Romana said, hoping Martha would drop it. The problem with Martha was if she saw someone who looked human, she tended to ignore the fact said person was alien. Just because pathetic humans couldn't do something with their biology didn't mean the same could be said for Time lords.

Jack looked at the man, who still hadn't introduced themselves. " What about the beastie boys outside?"

" We call them the Futurekind, which is a myth in itself, but its feared that's what we'll become. Unless we reach Utopia."

Romana leant forward, " And Utopia is...?"

The man became exasperated. " Every human has heard of Utopia. Where've you been?"

" Not human remember." Romana said, ignoring the two humans who'd travelled with her, though Jack had merely hitched a ride.

Leading them over to a computer, he said, " Over and over again, the call came. " Come to Utopia." Originating from that point." He pointed on a dot on the screen.

Romana didn't take her eyes off the screen. " Where is that?"

The man said, " Its far beyond the Condensate wilderness. Out towards the Wildlands and the Dark Matter reefs."

The names meant nothing to Romana, but since she was 100 trillion years outside her comfort zone then she was supposed to be surprised. " Calling us in, the laat of the humans scattered across the night."

" What do you think's out there?" Romana asked, trying to keep her cynicism which had been a staple in her personality since her first incarnation. She found it hard to believe something that convenient would just suddenly appear.

The man shrugged, but Romana couldn't blame him. How could he possibly know?

" We can't know. A colony, a city, some sort of haven. That's where this place comes in. The Science Foundation created the Utopia Project thousands of years ago to preserve Mankind, to find a way of surviving beyond the collapse of reality itself." He pointed at the screen. " Perhaps they found it. Perhaps not. But its worth a look, don't you think?" He smiled at Romana.

She smiled. " Oh, definitely." She pointed towards the screen. " The signal's not automatic, its modulating. Good sign, someone's out there. And its a navigational matrix, so you can travel without the star to guide you."

The man nodded, then he clapped his hands together and said briskly. " Well, enough chat. If you could close the door on your way out, I can get back to work. I'm rather busy."

" That rocket's not going to fly, is it? This Footprint mechanism, isn't working, is it?"

The man retorted stubbornly, " We'll find a way!"

Romana's voice was brutal in its truthfulness. " Your stuck on this planet. You haven't told them, have you? Those people out there, waiting, they're convinced they're going to fly."

" They should live in hope."

Romana smiled. " Quite right, too. And if I must say, sorry but I don't know your name." She added looking him over.

The man jumped, realising she was quite right. In his haste, he'd forgotten to introduce himself. " Yana. Professor Yana."

Romana smiled. " Well, Professor Yana, this new science is beyond me. But all the same, a boost reversal circuit, in any timeframe, must be a circuit which reverses the boost." Romana picked up a cable with a box thing attached, and said, " I wonder what would happen if I did this," she took out her sonic screwdriver, and buzzed it over the device she was holding. An alarm started blaring, the system came on line. Yana couldn't believe his eyes. " It's working! But, how did you do it?" He asked her in awe.

Romana smiled again, loving the man's energy. " I'm brilliant."

**So, what do you think?**


	2. Chapter 2 The Return of Two Lords

**The Last of the Time lords.**

**The Return of Two Lords.**

With the footprint working and powering up, all the passengers had been galvanised into action. They'd been waiting impatiently for this moment, all their faith had been placed in Professor Yana and his team. Under their direction, they'd built the rocket at their instruction, and they'd been waiting for the time when they could leave Malcassiro.

All the necessary supplies for the journey were put onboard the rocket, waiting and the passengers themselves were picking up their bits and pieces, old artefacts and relics that had been saved over the countless centuries, and they were picking up their blankets. It reminded Romana of the hoverville she and Martha had visited when the Cult of Skaro had implemented their Final experiment.

As Martha and Jack had gone to help with the passengers, Romana helped Yana in the lab, she was working on one half of what he called the neutralino map and he worked on the other. Romana had already met Chantho, and now she'd met Magister, another one of Yana's assistants. Magister was an oldish man, kind and humble. He resembled the atypical grandfather, and he was busy tending to his own tasks.

As she fingered the wires, she stopped and sniffed at them. She looked up at Yana in surprise. " Is this...?"

Yana nodded, working on his side of the map. " Gluten extract," he explained off handedly, as though speaking about something so lowtech being used for something vital wasn't of great importance. " Binds the map together." He carried on working as though it wasn't something to be impressed with.

Romana fingered more wiring. " You built this system, that ship, out of scrap, staples and gluten extract." Romana was impressed, both by this man's ingenuity and his genius. " Professor Yana, you're a genius. I've met people that could repair a steam ship with just a few bits of string, but this..." She shook her head with a wide smile dominating her face. " Just building these systems and technology out of scrap-"

" Says the woman who made the whole thing work, actually Magister helped with the map, he provided most of the brainpower," Yana interrupted by giving his human assistant his just reward. " I spent most of my time building the rocket, Magister concentrated on the guidance units, the map, the basic systems for launching the rocket. He said I should get the credit for the legwork." Romana chuckled, " We had to use scrap 'cause there aren't that many mines or refineries in this segment of time." Romana nodded.

" If you and your assistant had been born in another point in time, your geniuses would be revered. It's easy coming to the end, but you and Magister are stellar. It's magnificent, just using some of these materials to improvise...Incredible."

Yana chuckled. " No, seriously." Romana insisted. " Throughout all the galaxies." Yana blew a raspberry. " Damn galaxies," he grumbled. " They had to go and collapse, but still," he conceded, " a little pat on the back would've been nice. It would've been nicer especially if I'd had a bit more help building the rocket, and the footprint."

Romana eyed him for a moment, her Time Lady mind easily concentrating on the task she'd been given and conversing with Yana. " Even my title is an affectation. Hasn't been a university for centuries." Yana continued. " I've spent my whole life going from one refugee ship to another, using the box down in the footprint room to help me launch my people into space to find a place to survive."

Romana frowned. " Box?"

" Yes, it's down below." Yana changed the subject a bit too quickly for Romana's liking; so far Yana had been forthcoming with himself. Why not with this? Romana made a mental note to ask the Professor to take her down to where this box lived. For now she would stay up here, and work.

" That footprint engine, you can't activate it from onboard that rocket, can you? Its got to be done from here, hasn't it?" Romana asked quietly.

Yana nodded. " Yes," he sighed. " I'd wanted to create a basic warp engine, but our resources were stretched thin. Besides there's not much of subspace to work with properly for that, and research would've been slow. The footprint was the second possible hope, the only thing we could actually build without much problem, but the work has gone so slowly. It's made me feel old, useless, and not just me. Magister is also tired, and he deserves a good rest. Me, Chantho, Magister, we've all agreed to stay put. Chantho, because she wants to die on her homeworld, Magister because he's exhausted, and me because I don't want to go to Utopia because the hope that's kept me going for so long has started to ebb. The one thing that's kept us going is not to disappoint the refugees."

Romana listened to Yana's speech sadly, she could see it in his eyes. He just wanted to stay behind, his work done, but not until he'd finished his final task with his faitful assistants. " You'd give your life so they can survive."

Yana nodded, then he stepped back. " I need to get down to the rocket, check the co-ordinate systems. It'll take an hour, but I'll be back. Magister, can you stay and help?"

Magister came over at once, and Romana smiled at him. He smiled back. " How do you feel about Utopia?"

" I'm not sure," Magister replied with a soft sigh. " Me and the Professor are getting too old for Utopia, but it's helped galvanise hope into the people. Chantho simply refuses to leave us. Time for rest, I think."

Attilo's voice came over the intercom. " Professor, Doctor Magister, tell Miss Romana we've found her blue box."

" Oh, fantastic," Romana replied.

" Romana?" Jack called from a panel on the other side of the room. Romana ran towards him, her willpower pushing aside her desire to flee. It had taken her time to become more accustomed to Jack's unnatural form of immortality, but the longer he was in her presence the easier it was for her to stay put in the same room.

Romana grinned as her eyes fixed on the police box form of her TARDIS. Magister came over curiously. " Doctor Magister, its a wild stab in the dark, but I might just have found you some help."

Romana left, not noticing the amount of familiarity in Magister's eyes. He didn't recognise it completely, but he recognised something about it...

* * *

Attilo's boys had managed to use an antigravity lift to bring / drag the TARDIS into the lab, but the damn thing was so old it was a wonder it didn't collapse. When the sweating men gratefully left, Jack overheard one of them say, " Another one of these things, you'd think we were building a collection," but before Jack could ask the man what he meant, Romana had unlocked the door and stepped inside.

Jack followed her, pausing over the threshhold. He remembered only too well how the TARDIS had acted like a bucking bronco, and he had no idea how she would take him now. Unlike Martha who saw the TARDIS as nothing more than a mere travelling machine, an advanced car, Jack had been blessed with the 51st century. In the 51st century, organic ships and sentient machines were well known. Granted they weren't as advanced as a TARDIS, but specialised genetic engineering had allowed humans to sense telepathically sentient vessel, and Jack had known from the moment he'd stepped onboard this amazing ship it was alive.

Jack opened the door carefully, and stepped inside. He frowned as he walked closer to the console, moving slowly in case lightning bolts of energised plasma shot down at him.

The telepathic aura of the TARDIS, usually so warm and friendly, now went cold, almost fearful. Jack felt like a bird in the presence of a sunning snake, one false move and the snake would go for ya. Carefully, he walked into the ship, letting the TARDIS get used to him, all the time keeping an eye out for Romana.

He found her easily.

The Time Lady was working under the floor paneling of the console room. " Hello, Jack." She said without looking up. Jack looked into the pit she was working in, filled with the usual unusual Time Lord technology.

" How'dya know it was me?" The ex Time agent asked.

Romana chuckled. " I could feel the TARDIS go cold the moment you walked in. Like me she missed you, Jack, but like me she just needed some coaxing to let you back in."

Jack wasn't sure how to take this, and forgot the real reason he'd come in. " You like Yana, don't you?"

" What?" Romana asked, her mind busy. She was trying to remember all she knew of Mark 5 power transfer systems. Whenever Romana boarded a new TARDIS, she would look through the manuals in the library before making trial experiments. You never knew when such research came in handy, but it was rare she needed to access this part of her ship.

" You were flirting with him. I saw you."

Romana stopped her work, and gazed the smug 51st century man. " Jack, I admire him. He's a genius, like Magister. There's nothing to it."

Jack smirked and walked out, leaving Romana to ponder. Did she fancy Yana? There was certainly something about him that appealed to her...No, the foolish Time agent was just being his usual oversexed self.

She got back to work.

As far as she was concered, Jack's sexual conversation was over and never happened.

* * *

Disaster. That was the only word that flittered through Romana's mind, and everything had gone well. The TARDIS was boosting the power to let the footprint work, her own little contribution, and Yana was supervising the work down below. Magister was in charge in the lab, and it had been going so well. The plan was this, help Yana and his refugee's leave, then offer the three of them the chance to travel back in time in the TARDIS.

Unfortunately something went wrong, and now Jack was on the ground, electrocuted.

Magister bent down to his level whilst Martha tried to do mouth to mouth. Chantho pushed the cable away.

" I'm so sorry," Magister apologised plaintively at Jack's corpse.

Romana looked down at Jack's body. The urge to scream and run away from the fixed point in front of her was almost overpowering as she felt time rewind around the still body, but she was a Time Lady, and she wouldn't run away if she could help it.

She had to ignore Martha giving him mouth to mouth. Couldn't the stupid girl see he was dead, that he was going to be fine? She had to shiver as one word popped into her brain.

Necrophilia.

Yana's voice came over the comms. " Magister. That young boy, Jate, who went into the footprint generator room. He's vaporised. We've failed." Yana looked down, and everyone in the room, Romana included, could feel the crushing weight of failure. That was until Romana had an idea, just by looking at Jack...

" I wouldn't be sure about that," Romana remarked. " The chamber is filled with this stet radiation, right?"

" Right." Magister and Yana said at the same time.

" And it destroys everything it encounters? Flesh, organic matter, etc?"

" Yes. What are you getting at?" Yana asked impatiently, the weight of his failure weighing him down.

Romana ignored them. She walked over to Martha, who was still futilely trying to revive Jack. Romana bent down, and firmly but gently lifted Martha away.

" Leave him be," Romana said, pulling her away but the struggling human wanted to get back to her patient. Romana was counting down the seconds. 15.

" You've gotta let me try." Martha tried to say pleadingly.

But Romana was firm. " No. Listen to me, leave him alone."

10.

" You've got a room you can't enter without dying, right?"

4

" Yes."

2.

" Well," Romana began, ignoring Jack's sudden intake of breath, and the gasp of residual pain. " I've got just the man for the job." She grinned.

It vanished when Jack had to ask, " Was someone kissing me?"

Martha laughed, but Romana grumbled, wondering what made Martha have a fetish for kissing people who were clearly dead.

* * *

Romana and Jack ran through the now empty corridors all the way down to the footprint coupling room. They found Atillo and Yana there. " You can go now, Lieutenant." Romana said.

" The chambers flooded." Atillo argued.

" We've found a way of tripping the system," Romana replied reassuringly, hoping the man didn't notice Jack stripping off his shirt, much to Yana's unspoken surprise even though the professor had clearly watched the electrocution and ressurection. " Go!"

Romana went to check the panels of the room, then her eyes flicked over to Jack. " What's the point of taking your clothes off for"

" I'm going in."

" Magister said the stet radiation doesn't affect clothing, just flesh."

Jack had just finished putting his braces on, hands on hips, appearing as one of those really bad images of Flash Gordon. " Yeah, but I look good though." He ignored Romana's look of annoyance, and rushed to the coupling door.

He turned back. " How long have you known?" He asked.

Romana didn't see any need to hide. She knew this question would come sooner rather than later. " Since I ran away from you. Good luck."

Jack got into the room, wincing as he did. The radiation was almost tangible, like a swarm of angry wasps going into sting him, or those killer bees he'd met in America when life in Cardiff made him beyond bored.

Ignoring the stinging radiation that formed beads of sweat down his back, Jack got to work, also ignoring the now empty radiation suit belonging to the unfortunate Jate. Yana and Romana watched him carefully, waiting to see if he collapsed and evaporated.

Martha's voice came over the comms. " Romana, are you there?"

Romana answered her at once. " Receiving, Jack's inside."

" He's still alive?" Martha asked.

Romana smiled as she watched the ever dependable Jack get to work. Whatever your issues with the man, he would always be busy. " Oh, yes."

Magister's voice came over the comms. as well. " He should evaporate. What kind of man is he?" The watching Yana couldn't help but agree, but he said nothing. He merely watched his new friends as they worked.

Martha answered him, forgetting Romana could hear as well. " I've only just met him. Romana travels through time and space and picks people up. God, I make us sound like dogs. Maybe we are."

Romana quirked an eyebrow, resisiting the urge to shout at Martha. Clearly she'd forgotten - surprise, surprise - the comms. were still open this end as well as hers so the Time Lady could hear her speak.

Magister's voice was hesitant, and Romana was too focused on Jack to notice Yana's own confusion. " She...travels in time?"

" Don't ask me to explain it," Martha replied, " that's a TARDIS. That box thing. Sports car of time travel she says."

Romana pressed a control that would stop Martha from interrupting what she and Jack were going to talk about. This conversation was a long time coming, and Romana had been dreading it since they'd arrived here, only she'd never realised how much she'd been dreading it until now. She was so focused on Jack she didn't notice Yana, and his almost shell shocked look.

" When did you realise?" She asked Jack.

Jack didn't need to ask her to be specific, he'd been waiting for answersd for years since being abandoned on the gamestation. " Earth, 1892," Jack replied, his fingers flickering over the code buttons to release the coupling, alternating between looking at what he was doing, and the coupling he was working on. " I got into a fight on Elis island, man shot me through the heart. Then I woke up. Thought that was kinda strange, but then it never stopped." The coupling opened, and Jack worked on it, his frustration about never being able to properly die giving him renewed strength. " I fell off a cliff, trampled by horses, World war 1, World war 2. Poison. Starvation. Stray javelin." He added one of the unusual ones.

Romana whistled. " Ow!"

" In the end, I got the message. I'm the man who can never die." Jack carried on, his next sentence bitter and angry, not that Romana blamed him. " And all that time you knew."

" Now you know why I left you behind. Believe me, it wasn't one of my easiest decisions, Jack. Like I said in the wasteland, your wrong." Romana said.

" A freak, I believe was your exact word." Jack retorted, the word still stung.

Romana winced. " Yes," she admitted, " but it was the only way to get you and Martha to shut up and stop making assumptions. Does it never occur to your stupid, ape descended race that just because you travel with me, that gives you the right to make unfair assumptions about me? Its strange, but you humans get bored of things all the time in your little existences; friends, family members, toys you cherished for years as children, do I attack you for that? No, so why should I take it because I have left people behind?" Romana sent out her ice lady glare, and Jack, despite his anger, felt his insides freeze in that oh so wonderfully familiar and almost forgotten way. " I had to shock you both to shut you up. Don't forget Jack, I don't have to have people travel with me. If you feel so strongly about it, then you can leave. " Romana sighed as she looked at him, the ice queen persona leaving her and leaving a tired shell behind.

" Believe me Jack, I had to leave you behind, especially in that case. In normal circumstances, maybe, maybe I would have taken you with me, but...looking at you Jack makes me want to run away because you are wrong."

" Thanks." Jack hissed.

Romana sighed. " You are, and I can't help how I feel. You forget, I'm a Time Lady, and that's more than a title. Its a graduation, enlightened and changed from Gallifreyan into a pure child of the universe. Time is flowing through this room, Jack, through every being I meet. Have you never stopped to see rust on metal, crumbling brickwork? That's entropy, time flowing through an object. To a Time Lord, that's the normal existence of things. In your case, time is...stuck. Still. You've been anchored to a single point, making you a fixed point in time and space. You, my friend, are a fact. You are not meant to exist. Even the TARDIS knows that. She tried to throw you off, and ended up shooting all the way to the end of the universe just to get rid of you. The only reason she tolerated you when you walked inside was because I was there, she merely used my example."

" So what you're saying is you're - ah!" Damn this one was heavy, Jack only hoped the others weren't as bad. " Prejudiced?"

The word hurt Romana. " Never thought of it like that. I have good reasons though." She added in her defence.

Jack felt a little bad at hurting Romana like that, but he had to carry on. " Back when I was mortal, I was facing three Daleks. Death by extermination. What happened?"

Romana's voice was as cold as her face. " Rose. She came back after I sent her home. Do you remember when Blon Fel Fotch Slitheen opened the heart of the TARDIS during our stopover in Cardiff?" Without giving Jack the opportunity to answer, Romana carried on. " Rose did the same, only she ripped open the TARDIS instead of it simply being an accidental side effect of what Blon was doing. She absorbed the time vortex itself."

Yana and Magister were both hearing the words and phrases, time vortex, fixed point, fact, and TARDIS echo in their brains. Something was stirring in their souls...

" What does that mean exactly?" Jack asked working on a new coupling.

Romana's voice was cold as she explained. " No one is meant to have that power, not even me. If I opened the heart open and peered inside, I'd become a goddess, a vengeful goddess. But Rose was human." Somehow Romana made the compliment sound like an insult. " Everything she did was human. ' I bring life,' she said, and in that moment, six minutes after you were killed, she brought you back to life. I felt it, Jack, the tremble in the timeline as she'd brought you back to life. It filled me with horror because I knew I would have to leave you to your own fate. And she didn't do a good job as you've probably found out." She added darkly, watching Jack. " Its one thing to use the time vortex to burn down half a million Daleks into dust, that's easy. 200 Dalek ships, simple. But bringing someone back to life, especially by someone with the kind of moronic intellect of Rose Tyler, that's hard. If she'd done it properly, then you wouldn't be immortal. Maybe more energetic than you are at the moment, but mortal. Instead Rose brought you back forever, unable to die, but she brought you back six minutes. That's how long you're dead for, Jack. Six minutes after you die, you come back to life, but there's no way to make it permanent. I counted them mentally whilst you were dead after being electrocuted in the lab. Those six minutes are a loop, the place where Rose made you immortal is a fixed point in the timeline. Your timeline, and there's nothing anyone can do to reverse it."

Jack asked desperately, his arms felt like they were lead, but he had to ask. " Can't you do something?"

Romana's pitying eyes made Jack angry, but not with Romana. " No. I can't. What's happened to you Jack, is a clear example of why I left Rose behind after my regeneration."

This was news to both Martha and Jack.

" What do you mean, you left her behind?" Jack asked stunned.

Romana leant against the door. She was quiet for the moment as she gathered her thoughts. " I left her behind because as far as I was concerned she was more trouble than she was worth. You wouldn't believe this Jack, but Rose moaned at me because I'd regenerated. It was up to Jackie and Mickey to try and help me, especially after Rose grew bored of playing nurse to me. They never gave up. That's another reason I left you behind, but back to Rose. Did she tell you about Adam Mitchell, and how he'd tried altering the future for his own benefit? After he'd failed, I took him home, destroyed the recording, and simply left him to his fate." Romana frowned harder." Then Rose, not learning anything about what happened to Adam, showed her true colours. I invited her Jack, I said travel with me in space, and she said no. Then I said time travel, and the first place she wanted to go was to see her father die."

Up in the lab, still oblivious to the still form of Magister, Martha wondered what was so bad about that. She was pleased Rose Tyler wasn't the person Romana painted her as.

" She witnessed her father being hit by a car, and she ran away when I told her to go to him. After that she asked me to try again." Jack felt a chill go through his body. No, she couldn't have been that stupid.

Romana filled in on the growing nightmare. " Rose didn't listen to me as we watched our past selves, and she raced right past them to push Pete Tyler aside. After that, reapers swarmed in. They consumed the human race, save for a few survivors. As you can guess, I wasn't pleased with Rose. When you met us she was under probation. I'd slapped her in the church we hid in to make her understand her stupidity. I kept her with me for reasons I'll go into in a bit. In the end, my attempt to restore the timeline failed, and I'd been consumed by a reaper. Rose had given up, but Pete Tyler had figured it out." A wry and unwilling smirk appeared on Romana's face as she said the next part. " The smartest Tyler yet. After the...adventure," Romana spat the word because that hadn't been an adventure for her, not that Jack could blame her. As a time traveller himself, he was only too aware of the dangers posed by the reapers. Rose had never mentioned meeting them, or causing an incursion.

" Before the Time War, I used to be a different person. Three different people. I don't know if you know this Jack, but the Time Lords used to believe in maintaining the structure of the universe, and it was a major job. I graduated from the academy with a triple first, and that's an achievement. I believed that our philosophy and knowledge over time travel was unsurpassed. Now, I find myself having to preserve the timeline." She eyed Jack, who felt like he was an unfortunate morsel speared to her fork that she was about to munch on. " Alone. You rant about being immortal, how unfair it is. Its alright for you, you've still got a human race. Me, I have nothing except a TARDIS. Its been decades since the war for me, and two incarnations, and the silence in my mind where I used to hear my race...Its unbearable, Jack." Tears appeared in the usually calm and sharp Time Lady's eyes, shocking Jack.

Romana sniffed. " I have eight lives left, and I will never be hear another of my people again. You rant about your problems, did it never occur to you to look at mine and think you had it less bad? Okay, granted, your immortality will mean you'll need to move on, but you can still have children. Me, I can't. I'd always wanted to be a mother, wanted to bring children into the universe."

" You can still do that." Jack tried to be reassuring, but Romana took his promise, and ruthlessly shredded it. " I could, yeah, but how can I do that to a human being? Humans age, Jack. Age and die. I can't do that, not to anyone. Besides, the man I really wanted children with is dead. He died during the Time War."

Romana was silent for a while, watching Jack through her tears. Jack glanced at her. " You know what you said about Rose and the time vortex?" Romana nodded.

" Can't she use that to change me back?" Jack asked, though she

Romana shook her head. " No, she can't. After her little stunt with the Heart, I locked it. Only an accident can open it now, but there are so few things in the cosmos that can cause the same level of damage Blon Slitheen needed to do to open the console again, but if anyone tries to pry open the console they'll be exposed to the same level of energy found in a supernova." Jack's shock must've been visible otherwise Romana wouldn't have added, " Come on Jack, the Time Lords were responsible for the Time war, but before that we maintained the universe, and the time vortex is now under tremendous stress. If someone takes the energy into themselves, the universe could go down with them. I cannot risk that, not even for you." The look on Romana's face was enough to convince Jack persuading her was a bad idea, even though she truly sympathised with his plight. " I am the last of the Time Lords. I have trouble enough with time paradoxes without needing to worry about stupid stunts like that, and that's what the Bad wolf was."

Jack perked up. It'd been a long time since he'd heard those two words. " Bad Wolf was a paradox?" Now he'd thought about it, there was something...foretelling about those two simple words...And paradoxes could start out simply.

Romana nodded gravely. " And Rose was part of it. Rose was the centre of it. That's one reason she travelled with me. From the moment we met, I saw something in Rose, something in her timeline that meant no sense. I knew it would be realised by travelling with me, so I invited her. I didn't treat her like a stray dog," Romana added with some spite aimed at Martha, showing the thoughtless human she'd heard the comment the doctor in training had made earlier, " unlike what others think. I treated her well, but over time she was harder to keep a grip on, and the timeline drew closer and closer, but there was no solution. No answer to my questions. It was only when Rose returned after I'd sent her back with the vortex flowing through her head that it made any sense. Rose had sent the words, scattering them like seeds in a wind throughout time and space. I took the power out of her, and as you can see," she held out her hands to show off her new appearance, her eyes dark with an emotion Jack couldn't identify, showing the cost of the action to the Time agent, " I regenerated. Not the nicest of regenerations, believe me. My fourth incarnation, born out of war, pain, and sorrow, died after living a mere 5 years."

Jack worked on the next coupling, his thoughts in turmoil. He could see things from Romana's point of view, and it felt refreshing. After a hundred years of pain, of working for Torchwood, the former time agent had been bitter towards the Time Lady, thinking she'd abandoned him for no reason. But now the pieces of a much larger jigsaw were slotting in place.

Although he hated to admit it, Jack had found Rose a bit self righteous at times, and she'd often found herself at odds with Romana. The Time Lady was forgiving towards some mistakes during the time he'd known her, but she wasn't forgiving about major ones, and she wasn't afraid to make it clear what her feelings were. Jack remembered how Romana had told him during their first meeting when they'd - she'd - realised the Chula ambulance pod contained nanogenes that were gradually rewriting the human races DNA.

She'd lashed out in a terrible rage, and Jack had taken the brunt of it.

Romana was making sense, but there were a few things that didn't make sense. " You said something about regeneration, and why it was one of the reasons you didn't take me with you when you left the gamestation?" He asked.

The Time Lady nodded, her youthful face troubled. " Regeneration can be a traumatic experience for Time Lords. Even I'm not exempt from it," she added, implying to the listeners she was better at it than most, or simply letting them draw their own conclusions. Romana didn't know, she didn't care. She wanted them to draw their own conclusions. " Everything changes, including our brains. Picture it, Jack, if I was barely able to stand looking at what you are now, how do you think a regenerated Time Lord would take you? Our senses are heightened during the change, the remodelling of the senses. If you'd stayed, I could've been knocked out into a deeper coma than the one I suffered through. I was trying to maintain my health. I didn't want to regenerate, fall into a coma, only to not come out of it because you were with us. So I left you." She looked down at her feet. Leaving Jack was one of the worst decisions she'd made, because despite Jack's never ending sexual innuendos, he was a good man, he had a wonderful sense of humour, and although he could never replace the Doctor, he was like her favourite and beloved Time Lord in more ways and than one.

Jack wanted to know something though, something his access to Torchwood had allowed him to see. " Rose fell into a parallel universe, you said. Can't she come back?"

Romana closed her eyes, and shook her head. " No. When the walls of reality closed, they closed forever. When the Time War was at its beginning, we locked down the universal barriers to stop the Daleks from entering other realities, and after the war it was like they'd never been opened to begin with. She's gone now, she's trapped in another reality." Romana's face was thoughtful as she considered the problem. " The only conceivable way for her to return is if she used a naturally occuring fissure, but I don't know if it would actually happen, not in this lifetime. The question would be does she even want to return? I left her behind in her time, leaving the TARDIS phone number with Mickey and Jackie with instructions to call in case of some kind of disaster."

Jack shook his head.

Romana saw the motion. " What, you think I was harsh with her?"

" Yes."

" Jack, Rose made you immortal. I have to protect the universe, and if it means seding someone who travelled with me away, then so be it." Romana glowered at him.

" Why do you treat Martha so badly?"

Romana was stunned by the question. She hadn't seen it coming. " What do you mean?" She whispered.

" Martha says you compare her to Rose." Jack replied. He wasn't being accusing, just curious. When Martha had told him that, whispering it behind Romana's back, the former Time Agent couldn't help but think the young woman's actions were a bit petty.

" Martha is like me, well the first me," Romana replied after a minute silence. " Back then I believed I knew everything. Martha's got so many bad tendencies. One of them is to look at things from a human point of view. She forgets I'm not human, even though she's got more than enough proof of that. I don't compare her to Rose, but I thought I was allowed to talk about my past companions, or is there a law against that?"

Jack and Martha winced, the latter because she'd never thought Romana was just making comments. It had honestly never occurred to her Romana was simply saying things.

She smirked suddenly.

Jack shivered. Romana's smirks ranged from kind and humourous, to evil and insane. This one was evil. Pure evil, and Jack had seen it only once.

" What?" He asked wearily.

Romana laughed, shaking her head as hysterical laughter bubbled from her chest. " What?!" Jack shouted impatiently.

Romana shook her head, then she gained some control over herself. " Coming back to life's the least of your problems," she choked out.

Jack frowned stupidly. " What're ya talking about?"

The Time Lady gained enough control over herself to answer the question properly, but her smile never left her lips. " You're probably going to experience the entire human evolutionary cycle." She replied, her eyes and expression ranging from sympathy to evil amusement.

* * *

" WHAT?!" Martha shouted in the control room.

* * *

" What?" Jack whispered; he hadn't expected this. Immortality meant never aging, never dying. Not evolving.

" You heard me, Jack," Romana replied. " Don't tell me it never occurred to you. Oh my god, it didn't." She added seeing his confusion. Coupling almost forgotten, Jack stared at her, his eyes mini fires.

" What do you mean, evolve?" He ground out.

Sober, Romana leant closer to her door. " At the moment your fixed in time and space to the point you became immortal, but your body will age slowly Jack. That's the least of your problems," she looked at him with sympathy. " The time vortex is composed of incredible energy, a temporal energy with a power level consistent to a star. Millions of stars, actually," she corrected herself. " Whilst your DNA has several choices to evolve from, like say darker or lighter skin, no hair on your head, glowing eyes, the time energy will see your future timelines, then make its choice. Everything about you will evolve, your body and your mind. The 51st century is genetically augmented, including you, for sexual prowess. The time energy in your body will rewrite your entire biology. It'll take millions of years naturally, but when it does, if I were you, I'd find an uninhabited world, and colonise it with holograms. I wouldn't travel and evolve, not a nice combination. There's another consolation, you will die eventually. Just not right now."

Jack swallowed. He felt sick, and he had a right to be. He knew Romana had been amused when his evolution came out, but he knew she wasn't being cruel. She was simply pointing out new facts.

A fact.

" How do you know so much about facts?" He asked.

Romana looked at him in confusion, so he clarified. " If Time Lords can't take walking fixed points, how can you know so much? Did your people meet them?

She shook her head. " If only it were that simple. Its a common misconception my race evolved with our knowledge and technology. There was a time rift, more powerful than the one found in Cardiff, that radiated temporal energy. It rewrote our biology. Making us time sensitive. Over the aoens, we exposed ourselves to more energy, this time from the vortex to induce greater temporal senses. The idea was that the more senses we would have, the greater our understanding of time."

She sighed. " After we developed our TARDISes, many Time Lords carried out little or massive experiments, depending on your point of view. One Time Lord decided to research fixed points. He believed, at the time, we should be fixed ourselves. Fixed events had already proven how immoveable they were, try and save someone like Elvis from death, and the whole of reality collapses."

Romana's voice was grim. " He fixed himself into time deliberately, in essence becoming like you Jack."

" And the Time Lords didn't like that?" Jack guessed.

" No, we didn't," Romana replied. " Jack, even the Time Lords liked making experiments. What's the point if everything's handed to us at the snap of your fingers? Every race needs to experiment, to learn, but that particular experiment...It was wrong. He was wrong. The moment he woke up, he felt wrong. People who saw him ran away because of how different he was. Then he had an accident. He died. Like you, he woke up. The injury had been severe enough to prevent regeneration, and he was still alive. When we found out, realised, what had happened, we ran tests. We tried everything to reverse it. We went back in time, we tried unravelling his timeline. Nothing worked. We even used cruder methods, like dropping him from enormous heights, drowning him. Suffocation, blasting him with radiation that would kill a Time Lord within seconds. Nothing worked. Everything we tried failed. He kept coming back to life."

Romana sighed, " I wasn't born then, but I saw the records Jack. Just like every member of my race that goes through the Academy. It was compulsory. It was meant to teach us to avoid Facts and making them."

Jack was busy on the last coupling. " What happened to this Time Lord? Is he out there, somewhere?"

Romana let out a breath. " No," Was that relief in Romana's voice? " He left Gallifrey after building a ship to take him away. A TARDIS wouldn't take him because of his new nature. He asked to be sent to the beginning of the universe, just after the Big Bang."

" Why?"

" Like the rest of us, he wasn't sure how long he'd live for. He was sent back, and he sent holodiscs of himself trying to kill himself, or find a cure. He made new records. The longest interval between regenerations is 2,000 years. His bodies lasted for millions."

Jack breathed in. " Did he die?"

Romana nodded. " I don't think you'd have to worry. The human lifespan's different for a Time Lord, you don't regenerate to prolong your lives. You'll live for centuries, but the time energy will soon wear off, and you'll be able to die. Don't worry."

Jack was pleased he would eventually die, even if he would need to evolve into something other than his handsome self - damn, that one would take getting used to, he thought to himself.

" You might be out there, somewhere." Romana suddenly suggested.

" I can go and meet myself," Jack replied jokingly; though he knew from his time travelling it was a bad idea to meet yourself, not to mention what Romana would do to him if he did.

Romana smirked; in truth she doubted such a paradox could destroy the universe in its present state. There wasn't much left.

" Only guy you'd be happy with," she snarked playfully at Jack.

The Time agent laughed. " This new regeneration, kinda cheeky."

Romana laughed along with him. Their friendship was restored.

Finally Jack was finished, and to his relief Romana told him to get out of the radiation room. Jack left gladly; the radiation made him feel like he'd been thrown into a giant wasp nest.

Grabbing a phone to call the rocket, and presently ignoring the confused and dazed Yana, Romana asked Lieutenant Atillo. " Lieutenant, you ready?"

That was a stupid question, these people had been waiting for ages, but Atillo's voice came back excited but calm. " Ready and waiting. By the way, what are you going to do with your blue boxes? Professor Yana's got one just like yours."

Romana froze. " Say that again." Her voice trembled.

" Professor Yana, he's got one in the room with you. Another blue box."

Jack had overheard all this, glanced at the still dazed Yana, cursing himself for not mentioning what he'd heard Atillo's boys talking about earlier to Romana, and walked to stand by the paralysed Romana's side. Atillo was still talking, asking if Romana was still there. Jack gently but firmly took the phone from the Time Lady, and said, " Lieutenant, Captain Harkness here." He said, not waiting for the man to acknowledge him. " I need to know, where is this blue box?"

" There's a side corner in the control room you're in, its there in the alcove. Can we please begin the countdown?" Jack watched as Romana shook herself out of her daze, and went to where the lieutenant had told them. Jack spoke quickly, " Yes. Two minutes to ignition." He put the phone down, flicked a few switches as he went to prepare the couplings, and rushed to join his friend.

Romana had found the blue box. Jack studied it. It was identical in size, shape and colour to the TARDIS he already knew, but this one looked more weather beaten. Jack would've given money to see Romana's face, when she moved her hand shook as she pressed her hand against the door. She pulled away.

" A TARDIS, and I know which one," she said under her breath, but Jack heard every word. He moved round so he could look into her face. What he saw petrified him, Romana was usually such a secure, confident, and, dare he say it, sometimes haughty.

Now.

It looked like her world had collapsed.

" You recognise it, then?" He asked unneccessarily.

Romana didn't reply. She merely took out her TARDIS key, slotted it into the lock, and turned. A dull light was cast on their faces as they looked into the time machine.

" Bring Yana over. Now!" Romana ordered Jack. Before the time agent could move, Martha came running in.

" Romana? Where are you?" She called, panting from her long run.

Martha ran over, and stopped and gasped when she saw the TARDIS. " Another TARDIS?" She gasped, but Jack noticed she didn't look that surprised. " Magister, he's got a fob watch. The same as yours. Same writing, same everything. He says he's had it his whole life."

Romana didn't know how many shocks she was going to have, but Jack came over with Yana. The Time agent looked at Jack. " What fob watch?" He asked.

" Its this...chameleon thing," Martha tried to explain as Romana led them away from the open door of the TARDIS.

That simplistic explanation was the last straw for Romana. She was tired, these discoveries...how many times over the years since the war ended had she wanted to find another TARDIS, another Time Lord or Lady, only to be disappointed? Martha's simple explanation, and the use of the word thing every single time drove her into frustration.

" No," she spat, staring at Yana. The scientist was looking like a lost child, but Romana didn't care. Not right now. " Its a piece of technology, changes Time Lords into any other race. Including humans."

Jack looked between Yana and Romana, joining up the dots. " Two Time Lords," he breathed. " You might not be the last one."

" Check the rocket, please Jack." Romana asked before moving closely to Yana. " Professor Yana," she said softly. The professor looked at her. " Do you have a silver, or gold, fob watch?"

The innocent question drew a dazed smile from Yana's face. Romana knew the perception spell was breaking. " Yes," he replied, fumbling around in his waistcoat pocket. He drew out a silver fob watch. Romana slowly turned it over. And she let out a deep breath.

The writing...it wasn't just mere symbology.

It was a name.

A title.

The Doctor.

Romana let out a deep breath. She was about to point the watch and open it in Yana's face, before she remembered Magister. He had a pocket watch as well.

" Martha, this is important. Magister. What did he say about his watch?" She asked, almost pleadingly. Martha stood still, frozen in puzzlement. Wasn't Romana pleased about there being two Time Lords?

Her silence disappeared abruptly. Romana had pushed her face right into Martha's eyes, only a few mere centimetres from her nose. " WHAT DID HE SAY?!" She screeched, eyes flaring with panic, anger, and desperation. Jack swung sideways, stunned by the scream.

" He looked at the watch like he could hardly see it, like that perception filter thing. It's brilliant, isn't it, another Time Lord?" Martha said, adding the last question to ease the tension. It didn't work. Romana glowered at her. " I already know what other Time Lord is here, Martha. I don't know who Magister is."

She turned away slightly, her mind going through a list of possible Time Lords. The High Council could be ruled out, and a large number of the populace, except for the most inventive of students, but remembering those from her time at the academy, she could safely say not many.

A renegade, then.

The Corsair? Maybe. Possibly explains the mature side to the immature, and dare she say it, dashing buccanneer she'd known.

It could be a male version of the Rani. She had vanished, and Yana, or rather the Doctor, had said Magister'd helped with the rocket and the systems, and the ingenuity factor was there.

Drax? Could it be Drax? Okay, he'd been annoyingly cheerful, but he'd been a genius and a brilliant engineer. Could he have matured, or was it just the programmed personality?

Please, let it be Drax, she thought to herself as her mind went through the list of nasty pieces of work.

Jack came to her, handing her the last ignition key, and remembering her commitment to the last of humanity, set to work on priming the footprint. It was a gravity pulse! Made sense.

" He escaped - they escape- the time war," Jack corrected, glancing at Yana. " The end of the universe, perfect place to hide."

Martha, still not realising how similar individual Time Lords were to some humans, and not understanding Romana's final problem here, carried on. " Think what the Face of Boe said. His dying words."

Romana didn't want to think.

" He said -," Martha screamed when the coupling room exploded with light.

Then Romana felt it. In the part of her mind, now long dormant, old senses sparked into life as a Time Lord presence slowly but surely entered her mind. She closed her eyes, feeling the presence.

Her eyes shot open in horror.

No.

The Master. He was alive, that maniac. That cowardly traitor, he'd survived the war afterall, and here he was, in the guise of a lowly human, at the end of the universe.

And he could hear her, too.

That familar dark mind she'd barely glimpsed at when she'd met the monster her people had given birth to, an education unparalleled in the universe. Back then Romana had seen the Master as nothing more than a thug.

He was laughing at her, in her mind, but she could feel confusion, and the question Romana knew he was asking. Where is everyone else?

Not wanting to have the Master enter her mind so easily, she shut her mental barriers off, and reinforced them. She breathed in deeply, then remembered she was still holding the Doctor's fob watch. As Jack was talking with Atillo, she turned and opened the watch straight into Yana's face. A stream of golden light left the watch, and went straight into Yana's face.

When the light mist died around his head, Yana stared at Romana, who smiled. " Hello, Doctor."

**Author's Note. Please leave some feedback.**

**Next Chapter - The Escape.**


	3. Chapter 3 Supernova

**The Last of the Time Lords.**

**Supernova.**

Disorientated from being nothing more than essence inside the pocket dimension within his fob watch, it took the Doctor a few moments to get his bearings. The first thing he felt was panic. Trapped inside the special environment of the fob watch, the Doctor hadn't been able to properly assimilate his latest incarnation without the connection to his body despite recovering his mind from the memories of what had been done and what he'd done during the Time War, though he was aware of what was going on outside despite not being able to truly interract with anything. The perception filter laced into the watch had also prevented anyone from asking about the watch, or allowing the Doctor to communicate outside. The spell was broken by Romana's conversation with Jack Harkness, and being back in his own body with its array of 27 temporal senses it was a shock to physically feel it, the presence of a walking, talking fixed point. It was so wrong it wasn't funny.

Neither was the lack of knowledge of his new self. It was extremely painful, regenerating into a new body, but it was even worse when the same body was separated from the mind, and rewritten into a human body with a human mind only moments later before he could properly adapt to his new incarnation. The Doctor had just regenerated in his TARDIS, riding the shockwave when Gallifrey had exploded within the Timelock, though the paradox was within the lock Gallifrey and the Daleks were still fighting, forced to relive the war over and over again. The sudden painful shock and movement from his eighth and smaller, more war scarred body to the more universe weary ninth had stunned the Doctor, so much so he hadn't been aware of the damage his TARDIS had endured, and he hadn't been aware of the chameleon arch on his head until it was too late. The Time Lord could barely remember any of it. It was a daze.

Being inside the watch, cut off from his body and his TARDIS, not to mention the lack of any telepathic contact with any surviving, if any, Time Lord or Lady, the Doctor had to live inside the confines of the watch, alone with nothing to do except live inside the virtual world inside the watch.

The watch's virtual environment had replicated the Doctor's memories of places and people he'd seen on his travels in the wrong order. That was the trouble with fob watch technology, it was meant to be interesting, and even put a new spin on things, but deep down it was just as pointless as some other pieces of Time Lord technology. Oh, the Doctor had settled into his new, virtual, ninth incarnation, but he'd been yearning for a chance to come back. He'd tried everything he could to try and break the perception filter's spell so then someone like Magister or Chantho would draw attention to the watch for his human self to see it, but it didn't work. Nothing he did worked.

Worse, sometimes the watch, as though it were sentient and blamed him for his actions, or rather misactions during the Time war, had brought out some of the worst of his mistakes during the war. The Doctor's eighth incarnation had been someone who loved life, and valued it enormously. The eighth Doctor was certainly a mirror opposite of the seventh, more manipulative incarnation, who had barely felt a shred of remorse when he'd manipulated Ace. The Third Doctor had spoken about his old mentor K'anpo, but the Eighth Doctor truly embodied every lesson the ancient hermit Time Lord had, and in those lessons he had found himself fighting the Daleks during the war. The Doctor had never liked fighting because it went against his philosophy. For a man who prided himself on abhoring violence, the Doctor found the Time war distressing.

For the Ninth Doctor, it was like seeing someone else's actions, and in a way it was true. The Eighth and Ninth Doctors were totally different people, shaped by differing events. The Doctors before the Ninth had seen things in black and white, with the occasional grey, but none of them had ever seen or fought in something like the Time war. Before the war, the Doctor had liked to think he'd seen terrifying conflicts - human, Cyber, Dalek, even Sontaran wars, but they all paled in comparison to the Time war the Daleks had waged against the Time Lords.

Now in his Ninth Incarnation, the Doctor realised how much he'd changed, whilst he was inside that watch. He could no longer afford to have people travelling with him in the TARDIS, it was just too dangerous.

His actions concerning showing someone as evil and dangerous as Davros, whom he'd foolishly tried to save from the jaws of the Nightmare Child, when all the creator of the Daleks would do would be to cause more destruction, but the Doctor had done it anyway. The Eighth Doctor had, but the Ninth Doctor would have simply turned his back, and let Davros or the Dalek emperor burn. The universe would be better off without such monsters, and wouldn't miss them.

The loss of the Time Lords had haunted the Doctor, and the fob watch had allowed him a place to meditate or a load of Dalek shaped china models he could smash to his heart's content if his mind went down the more violent route.

Then Romana had come, like the angel she was.

Romana's arrival had sparked interest in the Doctor's essence, and he'd tried shouting telepathically through the perception filter. If he'd had proper vocal cords, then the shouting would've choked the Doctor's lungs as his throat would've been clogged with blood. It had been hopeless, until Romana had that conversation with Jack Harkness, and the nearby Yana had finally managed to slip and allow the Time Lord consciousness he was carrying to gain some control. The Doctor had been distressed Romana had, indirectly, created a fixed point, a fact, but that was pushed out of the way when the perception spell weakened. With the perception filter breaking, it had been easy for the Doctor to influence the human's spell to open the watch.

The first thing he'd felt was silence, then the voices of Romana and, more terrifying, the Master, filled his mind. Dazed, and slightly confused, the Doctor finally saw his old friend and love interest.

Romana had certainly grown more beautiful in her regenerations, but her physical beauty masked the pain she felt. Oh, the Doctor had heard the pain and misery she'd felt as she'd travelled the universe after the war, believing she was truly the last of their people. Her pain had made him angry, angry he hadn't been there. For her. For the woman he'd loved for so long, but he doubted she would share such an interest, though he had been stunned when she'd revealed she'd always wanted to become a mother. The Doctor never knew Romana had ever harboured such a wish.

She'd never seemed like the type.

" Hello, Doctor."

It took the Doctor moments to process everything. During his painful regeneration, he'd been clinging to the dwindling mental screams of his race, so he hadn't been aware of Romana's mental presence, but it was here now. She was delighted, a little frightened, but he wasn't sure why.

He narrowed his gaze at her.

" Romana." He opened his arms, unsure what to do. He hated that, but then again he shouldn't have been surprised. His Ninth personality had been trapped inside a pocket watch, watching his past mistakes inside the environment. But he could tell Romana about that later.

Romana slamming into his body with the force of locomotive stunned him. He wrapped his arms around her, and he smelt her vanilla scented hair. Okay, that was the right thing to do.

The two Time Lords held each other, feeling the others mental and physical presence.

Unseen by both, Martha and Jack watched this touching reunion though both couldn't help but think about the other Time Lord. Why was Romana seemingly scared of him? Why wasn't he down here, celebrating meeting more of his people who'd survived the war that had destroyed the Time Lords?

Jack Harkness had lived a long time, the time he'd lived in the Agency to his days in the con-artist business, to his time travelling with Romana, to being seemingly abandoned in the year 200,000 ankle deep in Dalek dust and the ashes of Earth. Lucky for Jack he had a vortex manipulator on his person, even if he'd ended up overshooting a full hundred years in the past to his target time zone. At least he'd managed to reach a time zone free and innocent of the horrors of the future.

The one thing Jack remembered about his time in the TARDIS was how Romana would mention the word Doctor, and freeze, her eyes and face a mask of pain and grief.

The Time agent discovered Romana's Time Lord heritage, and the first thing he'd done was deny it because there were no such thing as Time Lords. They were just a legend in the Time agency, and the few whispers of the higher species he'd met. To meet one was enough for Jack to accept the truth, especially with the TARDIS. Legends, or rather, the myths of the Time Lords had spoken of their legendary Time ships, how they were much bigger on the inside, but Jack had encountered similar technology before, so he hadn't seen the connection until Rose had let it slip Romana was a Time Lord.

Jack had asked her questions on her people, back then they could be called innocent and curious, but to Romana they were probably nosey. Now Jack knew he'd made the mistake of asking her too many painful questions.

For Romana, finding someone who knew only the basics about the Time Lords was enough to remind the grief stricken Time Lady her race wasn't truly gone, just forgotten by some. So, she'd answered some but not all of Jack's probing questions, keeping in mind that despite rescuing him and he'd redeemed himself from that mess with Chula nanogenes which had turned an innocent boy into a walking plague, he was still a Time agent.

To the Time Lords, the Time agency were positive proof why some people were not allowed to have time travel technology, or knowledge of it. The Time agency had been reckless, and it hadn't helped matters that whilst they never messed with fixed points of history they often made the mistake of tangling with the much older, and more powerful temporal powers not just the Time Lords.

As former president of the High Council of the Time Lords, Romana had often come away from diplomatic meetings with the Monan Host and the Nekkistani with her head ringing, not just from the Monan Host's hostility, but with stories of what the dratted Time agency had done, but there had been nothing she could do about it, not just because of the Time Lord's non interventionist laws, but of the stability of the Agency.

Despite being an acute annoyance, the Agency had actually done many great things that surprisingly made the Time Lord's job of policing the universe of unwanted time travellers so much easier, even if the agency hadn't known that particular fact. It hadn't been something the Time Lords wanted revealed, that it wasn't just some of the renegades who did the Time Lord's dirty work.

Jack had been stunned by the fact Romana had told him his agency had often been used without their knowledge.

For Martha Jones, who had no idea of some of the history of the Time Lords, this was one reunion where more questions were raised than answers. Romana had always intimidated her, not just because of her alien, and almost callous disregard for human, emphasis on human, life, but also because with the Time Lady, Martha got the impression she was only being taken through time and space because Romana wanted the sort of companionship you'd get with a dog or a cat.

The subject of the Time war, the Time Lords, and the Daleks were sore subjects for Romana, and Martha had quickly learnt to leave those subjects alone despite her obvious curiosity. The problem was Romana was lonely, despite having someone like Martha for company.

Until now.

Martha did feel guilty, not to mention annoyed by Romana spouting off about how many bad traits and habits she had, but it wasn't her fault, it was just how she did things. But for Romana, they seemed like crimes.

When Magister had shown her that fob watch, Martha had been stunned. She'd often wondered if there were Time Lords and Ladies in hiding throughout the universe, and this one proved it. So she'd ran to find Romana and Jack. When she'd seen Romana standing close to another police box, another TARDIS, with Yana and another fob watch, Martha couldn't believe it.

Another TARDIS.

Two people with fob watches like the one Romana had used to hide in from the Family of Blood.

But why was Romana so terrified of the other Time Lord? Did she know him?

When the Time Lord in Yana returned, and Romana called him Doctor, she realised at once she was meeting the Time Lord friend Romana sometimes spoke of and yet never spoke of. The Doctor was another subject Romana had made off limits, but Martha and Jack had learnt enough about him to know Romana loved him, and respected him enough to base her TARDIS's outer shell on his own machine.

The Doctor broke the touching hug. Romana slipped into her ice queen mode, though her eyes went to the floor shyly.

" How did you survive?" Was the first thing that came out of his mind and mouth, but neither Jack nor Martha seemed surprised by the question, if you'd believed someone whom you cared about had been thought dead, only to find them alive, wouldn't you want to find out what'd happened to them?

" I could ask you the same question," Romana replied, but her voice became more business like. " We have another problem. The Master."

Both humans saw the expression on the Doctor's face go from wondrous at finding another of his people, to dark and troubled. They may not know anything about this Master, but they could see he was someone these two Time Lords found troubling, if that was the right word.

The door closed.

Jack ran towards it, and tapped out a random sequence to open the door, and was dimly aware of Martha and Romana using the sonic screwdriver, and banging on the door to open it, though Jack wondered what Martha hoped to achive. " Get it open!" Romana shouted.

He was surprised when a rough and calloused hand almost as cool as cuccumber pushed him gently but firmly out of the way. The Doctor had to repress the urge to shiver at touching Jack. Though he'd heard about him in the watch, seeing him and touching him were two totally different things. It made him recoil, but the Doctor put that out of his mind.

He was focused on one thing.

Getting to the Master before the other Time Lord tried anything. But first he had to open the door.

The Doctor had already assimilated everything Yana had known, and that included door locks. Likewise the Master had done the same with Magister, but his codes were weaker than the Doctor's, and in no time the door was open.

Shooting out of the door, the three Time travellers and one recently returned Time Lord ran out, the Doctor following more slowly behind. Romana noticed her friend's actions, and waited for him.

Romana took his hand, and they both felt what felt like electricity shoot through their bodies. For a moment, it felt like time had slowed down, and the two Time Lords were unaware of anything happening, and the Doctor was tempted to grab Romana and kiss her, like so many times in the past he'd wanted to do that very thing when this beautiful creature had travelled with him.

But he stopped the moment, and Romana seemed to understand though she wanted desperately to do the same thing.

The problem with being in that watch for so long was this was a new incarnation, and the Doctor had no idea of what its stamina was like, and he was concerned that it being human for too long without adequate exercise though Yana had kept it fit by human standards, but his human persona had never seen the need to do a daily jog since he'd never had the time. Then again, Yana had had no idea of his true heritage and history, so it wasn't his fault. It would certainly have helped now though. Time Lords were naturally athletic beings, but the Doctor found himself tiring despite Romana's hand urging him on. Bless her, the Time Lady seemed to know what his problem was, but she wasn't shouting at him to try and hurry him, she was being kind and quiet, and urging him with her presence.

It felt good to have her with him. Her new form was beautiful, then again she's always been gorgeous...

The Doctor shook himself out of those thoughts, he had to focus on the Master. He knew the Time Lord was close to Romana's TARDIS, and he knew the Master better than anyone. The Master would steal Romana's TARDIS, and use it to escape from this planet.

He had to be stopped. Not just because he was a Time Lord, one of the last, but because if he escaped nothing would be safe. A rogue Time Lord was dangerous at the best of times, but this was the Master.

They were just running through a large corridor, when they found themselves meeting the Futurekind. The time travellers skidded to a halt, and the Doctor rallied them. " This way," he pointed to another corridor, one that would take them on a longer route to the main control lab. The recently returned Time Lord cursed the futurekind.

How had they gotten inside? He asked himself furiously. The only way they could get in would be if there was a massive security failure, or someone turned off the...The Master, the Doctor realised had been Magister, and as a result he would have all of Magisters knowledge about this place, not just the door locks.

The Doctor kicked himself mentally, how could he have missed it? The Master would know both he and Romana would be coming for him, so what would he do? Slow them down, giving him time to depart and also to open the place up to the Futurekind. What about Chantho? The Doctor gritted his teeth together as he thought about her. Chantho was annoying at times, simple, but she was a good person, and she had helped them the most when everything seemed helpless.

She was also the last of her race, so the Time Lords felt some kinship to her, but the Master felt kinship to no one.

She was as good as dead. Chantho would try and stop the Master, unknowing of what had happened to Magister, and would try to reason with him, unaware the man whom she was reasoning with was now a psychotic murderer.

The run to the control room did more good for the Doctor than he realised, though his lungs felt as though he was on fire. He ignored it. The door was closed and locked. The Doctor cursed as he went to work on the lock. He had to laugh. It seemed the Master had adapted, he'd layered the codes with six more.

Jack pushing him out of the way, smashing the touchpad with the butt of his gun as the sound of the futurekind drew nearer. The door opened, and there he was. The Doctor and Romana stopped. Romana felt as though all the air in her lungs had been knocked out of her. It was one thing to meet the Master briefly, and then feel his presence in her mind years later when there wasn't another voice left. The Doctor's return helped her cope, she dreaded to think of what would've happened if she hadn't found the other Time Lord, and just the Master.

For the Doctor, this encounter was something out of his worst nightmares. The last time he'd met the Master was in San Francisco, at the dawn of his last incarnation. The Master had possessed a paramedic, and was on his last legs. A dying Master was a terrible thing as he was desperate to survive, and the newly regenerated Doctor had nearly died as the Master tried to drain him of his remaining regenerations. This Master...New appearance, new regenerations?

But the Master had fallen into the Eye of Harmony. How had he come back? The Doctor took in the Master now, he was clearly wounded.

The Doctor took a step towards the Master when he realised the other Time Lord was backed up against Romana's TARDIS, and the Doctor dimly wondered why the TARDIS was shaped like a police box, but the Master closed the doors as he stepped in. Cursing himself for not bothering to keep track of his old enemy, the Doctor rushed towards the TARDIS door, Romana following him.

Pushing the Doctor to one side, Romana fumbled with the key, but the Master had locked the doors. Snarling angrily, Romana used her sonic screwdriver to try and open the door, but the Master deadlocked the lock.

Frustrated, the Time Lady banged on the door.

Martha had knelt by the dead Chantho, who'd been ignored up til now. " She's dead," she reported sadly.

Jack was trying to close the door. " I broke the door lock, help me," he said to Martha, who now heard the Futurekind on their way.

Romana shouted at the TARDIS. Her TARDIS. " Listen to me," she shouted. " It's changed now, we're all that's left. We're the last ones. Please, just listen to us."

The police box windows lit up with orange light.

" He's regenerating," the Doctor breathed.

When the light died down, Martha and Jack were screaming as they held the door closed against the Futurekind, but Romana and the Doctor took no notice of them.

" Now then," a voice called over the speakers. " Doctor. My dear Lady Romana, anyway, why don't I just stop and tell you both of my plans, and you can find a way to stop me? I don't think so."

The Doctor lost his patience. " Master, things have changed."

" Tough." The TARDIS started to power up, readying for dematerialisation, but Romana still had her sonic screwdriver in her hand. As she raised it, Jack called over for help. Although he wanted to stay and help her, the Doctor knew he was no good with whatever it was Romana was doing. He ran towards the two humans, once again ignoring Jack's condition. He pushed the door, sealing it shut. He pulled down the override lock, sealing them inside the lab.

Romana had turned her sonic screwdriver on, using her link to the TARDIS to lock out key systems. She'd managed to cause damage to the co-ordinate programmer, and the communication system, and the loudspeaker so she wouldn't need to listen to the Master gloating, but the evil Time Lord managed to dematerialise anyway.

Jack's cry of shock had her swinging round on the spot. The Doctor had grabbed the time agent's vortex manipulator, and was trying to reprogram it, but Jack wasn't helping matters. " It's burnt out," he tried to say.

Romana came over, her eyes catching the jar with her hand in it. Gritting her teeth, she grabbed it and went back to her friends, and flashed her screwdriver over the vortex manipulator as the Doctor programmed it. " You didn't have us, Jack." She said, looking at the Doctor.

" Your TARDIS?"

The Doctor nodded. " All we have. We have to get after the Master before he does too much damage. Besides there's the-" his voice trailed off as he looked at Romana, who didn't take the silence well. " The what?" She asked.

" I'll show you later," the Time Lord promised, knowing Romana would hound him until he came straight with her. The Doctor and Romana had finished their programming a bit later. It hadn't been a rushed job. Grabbing Martha's arm, they touched the manipulator.

* * *

Romana winced as they landed in the room where the Doctor's TARDIS stood. Her stomach felt like she was about to vomit, and from the complaints from Martha about the state of her head, she was willing to bet the human felt as bad as she did.

The Doctor recovered quickly, determined to reach his beloved ship. She heard him mutter though, " Time agents, when the hell are they gonna change their botched up technology?"

She shook her head, and grabbed Martha and Jack into the TARDIS.

The TARDIS was smaller than she remembered it, but that had been because of the Seventh Doctor's reconfiguration, but now the TARDIS console room appeared to be more organic, coral. Romana wasn't even sure she liked it, but the Doctor didn't seem to really care. Romana had to crack a smile when she saw him grin, she knew how much he loved this ship. When the TARDIS sensed her presence, the console lit up dimly, and Romana frowned. The TARDIS was almost out of power. Not good. The Doctor noticed as well, and he rushed to the console, and checked the ship over.

" The power is low. Too low for dematerialisation," he said grimly.

Romana came over to help, but Martha didn't move. She was looking over the TARDIS. It seemed more like a living thing than Romana's, but she was untrained to see the differences between this one and Romana's. She pointed towards the door. " Excuse me," she said loudly, drawing the attention of everyone. " How long will it be before the futurekind find us down here?"

The Doctor, seeing this interruption was nothing of great importance, went back to work. " There's no teleportation here, so they've never seen it. Hopefully they'll stay near the upper levels, looking for food before they come down here."

Martha shuddered at that, but the Doctor paid her no heed as he worked on his TARDIS's controls.

Romana saw his actions. " You're deleting rooms."

He turned and grinned at her. " Not exactly," he said. " I'm deleting console rooms."

Of course. Console rooms possessed more mathematical mass than normal rooms. Then her face dropped. " What about our dematerialisation? We need power for that, and you might sap the power from the console rooms your planning to delete."

The Doctor paused, calculating the problem. He nodded. " Yes, you're right," he admitted, looking around the room for inspiration. There was nothing outside, not unless he wanted to walk slap bang into the middle of the Futurekind. His eyes fixed on the vortex manipulator.

" Ah, of course." He breathed, walking over to Jack and tried to take the manipulator from the stunned agent. Jack by reflex, tried to stop the Time Lord, but Romana stopped them both.

" Hold it," she said getting between the pair. " Doctor, we often ask for something we need, and Jack we need the vortex manipulator to power the TARDIS up."

Jack tried to protest, but the Doctor said simply that if they didn't have the manipulator, they would be trapped here because the only power source the TARDIS had wasn't perfect.

In the end Jack grudgingly gave it over to the Doctor, and with Romana's help, was able to plug it into the console. Romana was standing by the navigational panel whilst the Doctor was milling around the console.

" There's a nice supernova," the Doctor was saying, coming round to Romana, who knew what he was talking about. " We can stop there, open the engines and drain the star of energy. Then we can get to Cardiff and fuel the TARDIS with temporal energy."

" Why do you need two different energy sources if the supernova's more stronger?" Martha asked confusedly.

The Doctor grinned. " Temporal energy will keep the TARDIS going for a long time, and I want my TARDIS going for a lot longer without refuelling."

" It's not that I don't want to have a self sufficient TARDIS," Romana added, setting the controls. " But I sometimes go for supernova energy to get an extra load of power, but not always because the supernova energy isn't TARDIS power. Temporal energy is what this ship needs."

Neither of the Time Lords had time to answer any more questions as the Doctor put his hand on the dematerialisation lever. " Ready?" He asked Romana.

The Time Lady nodded, her hand paused over the control that would drain the vortex manipulator and feed the energy collected by the deleting of the console rooms. Most of them had been rooms the Fourth and Third Doctor's had used but he kept the one he and Susan had used back when he was in his First life and the secondary wooden console room, followed by the fifth Doctor's refurbished console room used by his sixth and later seventh incarnations. The gothic console room was also set to go.

The Doctor pulled down the lever, and Romana touched the control. The time rotor hesitated as the ship began to dematerialise, the centre columm became more confident as the more energy was poured through the drive.

The Time Lords watched the energy flow carefully, so carefully both humans were afraid to distract them.

* * *

TARDIS travel was rapid.

In the Doctor's underpowered TARDIS, the trip to the supernova took a full two days when it should have been only a matter of minutes. The Doctor frowned as his TARDIS materialised close to the supernova. " We're in orbit above the supernova," he said to Romana briskly. " I've opened the engines, all we need to do is activate the energy siphon."

Romana watched him. If this was the Doctor of old, then they would be hurling towards the supernova because of a random miscalculation, but not this time. The threat of the Master and them being the last of the Time Lords was making the Doctor more attentive.

The Doctor activated the energy siphon, and slowly but surely the dull, almost dull light of the console room became brighter, more illuminated, but still dark. Romana knew the Ninth Doctor, quite unlike the fourth, had suffered, and so the darkness of the room blended in with his natural mood.

" Right," he breathed out. " We just need to watch that energy level, and then we can go."

Romana nodded. " What about the Master?" She asked him pointedly.

The Doctor sighed. " He almost certainly knows about the aftermath of the war, either from sensing the lack of voices, or from your TARDIS's records. What he plans to do, I dunno. In the past, the Master was careful not to provoke the Time Lords. Now they've gone..." His voice trailed off, looking down.

A hand on his arm made him look up. Romana was looking at him, her eyes shining with tears and pity. " I don't blame you for what happened, Doctor." She said.

" You should. I destroyed our people." He retorted roughly. He tried to pull away form her, but Romana wasn't having it. She pulled him back until they were almost nose to nose.

" No, our people destroyed themselves. Rassilon destroyed them, took them and brainwashed them into mindless savages," she replied harshly. The Doctor looked at her, stunned by the force of her retort. " Doctor," she carried on softly. " The Time War ripped out our people's morals, and it changed them. When Rassilon-" She stopped, trying to voice her memories of what the First Historic Time Lord had done, but she couldn't.

The name made her look down at her feet, hidden by the console, and she started sobbing as the memories ate away at her self control. The Doctor looked on in anguish, ashamed of himself for heaping all the blame on himself, for being selfish. Here was the most important woman in his lives, and she was sobbing her hearts out.

Romana sobbed. She sometimes did this when the weight of the Time war hit her, memories of her family, her beloved sisters dying...The council going behind her back on so many occasions, most notably to bring back a man who didn't care about the traditions he'd laid down in the first place. It felt good to let this all out. Someone came over to her, and wrapped her in an embrace. The feel of a double pulse told her who it was. She leant back from the Doctor, and looked into his eyes. He was taller in this life, she realised. But it made no difference. She made a decision. Self loathing was tearing the other Time Lord apart, she could feel that.

Acting on instinct, she stood on tiptoe, and kissed him on the lips. She pushed her tongue into his mouth, but his own tongue was still with shock.

The move stunned the Doctor, and he was slow to react. Romana was upset when he didn't respond, sad she had one sided feelings he clearly did not share in return, and she was about to pull away and apologise when the Doctor pulled her closer together, and kissed back. He slipped his tongue past her lips, and they played together. As they kissed, an electric change bolted between them.

Jack's droll voice interrupted them, and both Time Lords jumped away, cursing Jack for ruining their kiss. They spotted the Time agent standing in the doorway with Martha at his shoulder, how long they'd been there neither of them knew. Jack's question frightened them.

Jack had his arms folded. " Who's this Rassilon?"

" And what did you mean, the Time War ripped out your people's morals?" Martha asked, just as resolutely as Jack.

Romana and the Doctor looked at each other, still in their embrace. How much did you tell them about the war? The Doctor asked, initiating telepathic contact with her.

The Time Lady sighed. Not much. They only know bits and pieces, but not the gory details.

The Doctor considered. Do you think we should tell them, about the war? Romana licked her lips, considering. The Time war was something Romana hated thinking about, the memories of what the Time Lords, the people she'd loved for centuries had become, and what they'd done to themselves...After centuries of peace and incredible achievements.

If we tell them, we can tell them a more abridged account. We can talk about the war for decades, and they still wouldn't understand. Romana replied, looking at the Doctor for his input. Like her, he didn't really want to discuss the history of the war, but in this case it was necessary. They could discuss the war, and also control what they knew.

The Doctor sighed, and he pulled Romana to the seat behind the TARDIS console.

" Here's the story..."

**Author's note. The Master won't become Prime Minister. I have other plans for him.**


	4. Chapter 4 The Story of the Time War

**The Last of the Time Lords.**

**The Story of the Time War.**

" Here's the story, no one really knows how long the Time war lasted," The Doctor began, gazing at the two humans solemnly, hoping to keep his voice level and not give into his desire to lock the horrors of the war away in his head. " At first the war was simple to measure in terms of days, weeks," he looked down at his shoes. " It was seven years later that time began to become blurred by the effects of the war, and our sense of time no longer properly worked, so we can't tell. It didn't help both sides had time travel technology of incredibly advanced design."

The Doctor sighed, looked at Romana, as a thought occurred to him, and he shared it with her when she agreed, and then back at his audience. " First, I want us both," he gestured at Romana so she would back him up, " to give you the background of the war, and its origins, and that of the Time Lords themselves, just so you can understand what'd happened."

" As you've probably guessed, we're called Time Lords because of our mastery of time, but that's not it. It takes more than mastery of time and space travel to become Time Lords. Our homeworld was close to a temporal rift, a class 13 rift as opposed to the class 4 in Cardiff." The Doctor said, looking at Jack and Martha.

Jack breathed in shock. " You evolved near a temporal rift?" It explained so much, like where the Time Lords got their remarkable senses and insight into space and time. Theoretically, any race that evolved near a temporal rift had some of the universe pouring into their minds, affecting their bodies, and they also had unusual minds.

Romana nodded. " Yeah," she sighed. " Our ancestors evolved with time, and as the generations passed, each person was able to slow down the flow of time around them, able to peer into the future. It wasn't precognitive vision, but it was close. The visions combined with our people's already advanced intellect made us powerful, helped by a low level telepathy that exists to this day, as we can hear each other. " The Doctor and Romana shared a look, reminding themselves about the Master before Romana carried on. " What one Gallifreyan, as we weren't Time Lords then, were able to learn new technologies and sciences without the need to fight for it, and soon we were travelling the stars. Our society was advanced, with incredibly powerful hyperspace drives and genetic engineering, but then we discovered the concept of time travel. It intrigued us, considering our closeness to a temporal rift and our temporal insights."

" For the next thousand years, our people made experiments into temporal physics, slowing down time within a field, accelerating it into the past or the future, turning simple teleporters into basic time portals. Simple stuff. Then Omega and Rassilon stepped in." The Doctor steepled his fingers together. " Omega at the time was the foremost stellar engineer. He should be since he practically invented the field, and he'd been working on a means to blow suns up to create an everlasting supply of power, and originally he had nothing to do with time travel, unlike Rassilon, who'd personally made massive breakthroughs with time technology, but the two found common purpose as the experiments were creating a steadily increasing demand for power, so they worked together with the common goal of developing a fully functional time machine. At that point in history, loads of similar technology existed, but they were basic in design. They ripped holes in the fabric of time, and Rassilon captured a few to make a few experiments to build from to discover more of temporal physics, but he left them alone after a while."

Romana took over the story. " To cut a long story short, Rassilon and Omega worked together on a developing a stable wormhole, and loop it around the universe after they discovered the basics of quantum mnenomics, the science of the basic structure of the universe. We call them Block Transfer computations. They're mathematical formulae that can change the fabric of time and space."

" To create the wormhole," the Doctor said, " they detonated a dying sun, doubling the explosion. With work, they used a combination of block transfers and wormhole physics to create the wormhole, and as the nova became a black hole the nucleus was captured and taken back to Gallifrey, and became the Eye of Harmony, which became the power source of the Time Lords, and later TARDISes."

Romana smirked. " You didn't really believe TARDISes refuelled on time rifts, did you?" Then her voice became more solemn as she recalled the events of history. " Except Omega fell into the black hole," Romana said grimly, " lost into an antimatter universe until the war began, and he was freed."

Martha was about to ask something, but the Doctor stopped her. " Let's please finish this part before you ask any more questions, okay? The wormhole was laced with dark matter and gravitational energy from the Eye of Harmony, but the wormhole was narrow. It was twice as wide as the tunnels on the London Underground, and the massive amounts of energy were able to keep it open meant that it couldn't be widened. The time vortex was born," the Doctor was interrupted.

" Hold on, the Time vortex is artificial?" Jack asked, stunned. It made sense about why the Time Lords had that title, but he'd never imagined it was like that.

The Doctor nodded, and Romana stood up to bring up an image of the scanner. An image recognisable to the Time Lords as the Seal of the Time lords of Gallifrey appeared on the screen.

" This is the seal of the Time Lords," Romana said, tapping in another sequence, this one showing a view of the universe, with the same outline of the seal superimposed in blue, with little branches like the roots of a tree branching out of the rings of the vortex wormhole. " And this is the Time vortex."

" Our creation. A massive universe wide wormhole, with no outward connection, outside time and space." The Doctor rubbed his eyes. " We'd more or less become the Lords of time, but we still had problems. At that point, our knowledge of the vortex, and what was inside it, was a concern. We probed the vortex, and we discovered nothing large could enter it. A test ship found that out, quickly."

" What happened to it?" Martha asked, though Jack had a good idea himself.

Romana's answer was simple. " It was only a shuttle, but it disintegrated. The amount of gravitational energy tore the thing apart."

" Hence why we've built ships like this one," The Doctor opened his arms to encompass the whole console room. " Held in another dimension with the engines inside, keeping the crew safe inside in what would be very small confines, the TARDIS became the epitome of time travel technology. It sounds easy, but there were many models built to make it right."

The Doctor and Romana were silent, processing through their minds what to say next. Finally the Doctor spoke in a quiet tone. " Whether by political acclaim or popularity, more likely the former, Rassilon set up the traditions of the Time Lords, and he created the web of time. To the general populace, the web is held inside a pocket inside the vortex, designed to control history, but it had a more sinister function. Rassilon had a problem with developing races who might one day come to threaten the Time Lord's supremacy over the cosmos, so the web was designed to rig the competition."

" He destroyed races that might be better than his own?" Martha asked horrified, and for a moment she and Jack thought of their own race, how humanity could oppose the Time Lords, only to find themselves destroyed.

The Doctor nodded grimly, answering Martha's question, but making it appear to the two humans he'd been listening into Martha's dark thoughts.

" For millions of years our people travelled the universe, moving from one planet after another, mapping the cosmos, and assimilating all kinds of knowledge from the various worlds. At the same time, we asked questions, and the universe answered them."

Romana smirked at the poetic line. " Very poetic, Doctor." She nudged him teasingly.

The Doctor grinned at the compliment, and his eyes became almost wistful. " We called that time the Age of Exploration." He sighed, the wistful look in his gaze more and more pronounced. " Ah, the Age of Exploration, how I wish I'd been born then, in a time when the Time Lords actually went out there into the universe and explored."

" But you weren't born then, were you?" Martha knew she was stating the obvious.

Romana shook her head. " Neither of us were, Martha." She looked down at her feet. " We were born ten million years later. By that time the Age of Exploration was finished, and our people believed we'd gathered all the knowledge we could. We still created TARDISes and other pieces of technology, but we only did it once every fifty or seventy years."

Jack and Martha couldn't believe that a species as powerful as the Time Lords would wait that long to improve their technology. Even the higher lifeforms, and the more advanced cultures Jack had met on his own travels had been more or less complacent, but not as much as the Time Lords seemed to be.

As someone born in the 51st century, Jack had attended dozens of archaeological seminars by professors like River Song, Zabbandar O'licr about powerful empires who'd fallen into decay because they'd failed to adapt. This story was sounding like the Time Lords had ignored universal history, and gone down the slippery slope. No wonder the Daleks had managed to cause massive destruction.

The Doctor and Romana didn't seem to notice Jack's thoughts wander, so they carried on, or rather the Doctor did. " Gallifrey was protected by transduction barriers, temporal barriers that pushed our people outside time and space, and into a small pocket reality. Aside from the other temporal powers like the Monan Host and others, and a few scattered rumours and folklore legends, no one truly knew of us. But that didn't mean we didn't make contributions to galactic history. The destruction of the Great Vampires and the Racnoss spring to mind."

Jack pointed out something that surprised the Doctor. " A Racnoss web attacked Earth, but it was destroyed."

The Doctor swung round to look at Romana, stunned. The Time Lady nodded. " I killed the brood. I'll tell you later," she added, seeing his confused look.

Nodding at her wearily, but wondering just what had happened to her on her travels, the Doctor carried on. " It was when we encountered the Minyans of Minyos that we changed our policy. Before that we were unsure how to proceed, whether we should enter intergalactic affairs or not, but the Minyan incident answered it."

From the way the Doctor and Romana slumped forward, their faces anything but happy, both Jack and Martha had an educated guess about what had happened to the Minyans.

" The Minyans were a primitive race, but when we appeared to them they worshipped us like gods, which as you can imagine was flattering." The Doctor said. " We showed them the wheel, fire, medicine, the toothbrush, and eventually nuclear power. Over the centuries there was a growing movement, for every Minyan who worshipped the Time Lords, there was a hundred who hated and feared us."

Romana took up the grim tale. " They attacked our bases, taking our people by surprise, but we fought them back and they fled with heavy losses. The damage, though, was done, and only a handful of Time Lords returned to Gallifrey. We had the power to destroy Minyos, but we didn't. Our Lord President at the time made the prophecy, using the Minyans latent aggressiveness to logically state they would destroy themselves, and they did. The destruction of the Minyans resulted in the Time Lords erasing our presence from universal records, which is why so few know of us," she added for Jack.

The Doctor decided not to mention he'd met and helped some Minyans during his fourth incarnation, this story was too important to focus on so many disjointed topics.

" With the policy of non-intervention," Romana carried on, " the Time Lords only travelled on small and routine research missions, but there were some Time Lords who left for the hell of it." She turned to look at the Time Lord next to her. The Doctor grinned sheepishly. " Okay, I was one of those Time Lords, but can you blame me? Time Lord life on Gallifrey's a mix of duty and boredom. There's no social life, nothing. I was bored. What's the point of having near immortality if you don't live a little? What's the point in space/time travel if you don't actually travel?

" I stole this TARDIS, and began my travels, but eventually I was caught by the Time Lords." Here the Doctor's face darkened. " A member of my race had been helping a race called the War Lords kidnap human soldiers from various times on Earth, all the way up to World war one. They didn't go any higher because that meant a more advanced knowledge of technology."

" Hold on," Martha held up a hand to stop the Doctor, disbelief and horror on her face. " A Time Lord helped these people? Why?"

" To form an army to control the universe, to them humans were the most aggressive race in the universe." The Doctor replied. " In a way, he was right, but that didn't mean I had to like it. Their methods were shoddy, too. They used a form of TARDIS which was one of the most basic kinds, and believe me when I say I was disturbed when I stood inside one. At the time I was still on the run from the Time Lords. They used brutal mental conditioning, but it wasn't always effective, and was often reinforced with the use of a special form of eyeglasses the officers of the War Lords used when they went into disguise to control the human soldiers, but again it wasn't effective. The time zones were closed off behind mists to provide cover, but sometimes a soldier whose conditioning failed found themselves in another time, where they were killed off quickly to preserve their cover.

" When me and my companions at the time found out the truth, we quickly joined. I did my best to adapt a mental conditioning machine I'd captured, but I was captured myself before I could make a truly viable plan to fight the War Lords. I found out they were prepared to drop a neutron bomb on my friends, so I pretended to betray them. To cut a long story short, I was able with their help to shut down their scheme."

The Doctor looked uncomfortable. " I'd made a promise to help them get home, but I found their TARDIS travel machines were breaking down, so I had to make a choice. My freedom, or their lives. I chose them. I called my people, and by the time I got back to my TARDIS it was too late. I tried to elude the Time Lords, but they dragged me back to Gallifrey, where the leader of the War Lords was put on trial."

Romana placed her hand on his forearm, offering him support. She knew his past, knew how this trial would shape his future interaction with their people, but she also knew it was a painful time for him too, especially how Zoe and Jamie were sent back after their first adventure with the Doctor with their memories erased. His companions and the memories they left behind left their mark on the Doctor, and Jamie and Zoe were no different. Jamie had been an integral part of the Second Doctor's life and adventures, and Zoe had shown the Time Lord he was sometimes not as clever as he liked to think, but he'd adored her anyway, like a father would a daughter.

The Doctor smiled at her, pleased she was there for him. It hurt to think of Jamie and Zoe, he'd tried to tell them not to come with him in the TARDIS when he'd summoned the Time Lords after finishing up with the War games, but they hadn't listened. He'd known if they'd come with him they would be sent home with their memories erased. The Doctor doubted even if he'd told any of his companions about the danger they would've listened. The memory of the hurt confusion on Jamie's face as he watched his friend give into the Time Lords, Zoe's almost childlike sorrow as she said goodbye...That was painful, especially considering how far Zoe had risen from being a social reject in her century for being scarrily intelligent, to a fun loving young woman that the Doctor loved seeing smile.

The memory of them waving before they stepped into the programmed TARDIS to take them home, and the Time Lord who reassured the Doctor they wouldn't entirely forget him...etched into his mind, forever.

" The War Lord...well, he played for time," The Doctor managed to get out. " The Time Lords got him to speak because he underestimated what we're capable of. The Time Lord holding a trial against another species is almost unheard of, and that was the first time I ever saw one."

" Why?"

Romana answered Martha's question, seeing how distraught her friend was. " Normally we didn't interfere with the affairs of others, but the War Lord's actions changed that when he used our science to try and conquer the galaxy. Time travel produces all kinds of interference in the space/time continuum, and with the right form of monitoring its possible to control it." She took a breath. " When the War Chief gave the War Lord access to Time Lord technology, he made us responsible. The War Chief's fate, if he'd survived, was preordained. He'd have been vapourised, and the War Lord would have seen it, but since the War Lord ordered his execution it couldn't happen."

The Doctor sneered. " The War Lord basically told the Time Lords they were responsible for the whole thing, in a way he was right, but the Time Lords never sponsored it. Like Romana said about the War Chief, his fate was preordained. Our people took a very harsh approach to punishing time meddling. It didn't help when Gallifrey was infiltrated by the guards from the War Lord homeworld. They killed two Time Lords, the first time such a thing ever happened on our planet, in 10 million years of our reign over time.

" The War Lord took the guard's arrival as an omen, and he threatened the Time Lords, not a good move considering we were in comparison a giant to their grain of dust, and he tried to escape, taking me and my companions with him as hostages. It didn't work because I managed to activate the TARDIS security system. The Time Lords waited for us outside, and the War Lord came out ordering his thugs to kill us, but a forcefield immobilised them."

A grim smile of satisfaction appeared on his face, chilling Martha and Jack.

" A time loop was generated around the War Lord planet, imprisoning them forever, but the War Lord's fate was worse. Temporal dissolution, he literally never existed, just like his guards."

Martha clapped a hand to her face. " That's horrible!"

Romana's eyes were cold, just like the Doctor's. They had no problem with what happened, especially the Doctor, who'd known the War Lord, held at gunpoint by his guards, forced to listen as the despot tried to regain control on the war game planet when the resistence with his help made everything spiral out of control.

To the Time Lord's what happened was another example of what happened to those who got on the wrong side of the Time Lords.

The Doctor, seeing the human's emotions, decided to change the subject, but not going into the details of his exile just yet, he wanted to make his point first. " The encounter with the War Lords, and being back home for the first time in a few hundred years, made me see a problem with the Time Lords; we'd become too complacent. I just wish it hadn't taken two lives to make me see that, but for our people it was like nothing had happened. There was no change to our security, nothing."

The Doctor sighed, dreading the subject he was about to broach. " After being put on trial after the War Lord, I was exiled to Earth. My TARDIS knowledge was taken from me, and my appearance was changed." The Doctor's face became darker, and Romana wrapped him in a hug. He returned the hug gratefully. " I worked day and night, trying to find a way to bypass what they'd done to me, and to my ship." The Doctor looked around the console room.

" A few years after I arrived, I received a message from the Time Lords." A scowl appeared on his face. " The Master had come to Earth, and he wanted to get revenge."

" For what?" Martha asked.

The Doctor sighed. " It doesn't matter now," he replied hoping she'd drop it. It was important these two got an idea of what his people had been like before the war. He was surprised it was easier to speak about the Time Lords before the war, maybe it was because his people had been peaceful and not war mongering savages. " I worked for UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce as their scientific advisor. With their help, I was able to stop dozens of alien invasions."

Jack nodded. " I've encountered UNIT before, Doctor. Good people."

The Doctor nodded, but Romana frowned at her old companion. How did he know UNIT, and what the hell had he been doing for the last hundred years? This latest revelation was another question she'd have to ask Jack later, but not now.

" Yeah, but the Master often tested them." The Doctor replied, looking down at his hands. He silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts. " Not long after the Master first came to Earth, I managed to make, what I thought then, was a breakthrough with my repairs to the TARDIS. My exile had brought an unparalleled opportunity for me to study the time machine, and repair it."

" You didn't know anything about your own machine?" Jack asked stunned.

" You couldn't work it right?" Martha added.

Romana had to stop herself from laughing. The Doctor's inability to properly control his TARDIS was a running joke amongst the Time Lords. The Doctor glared at her, knowing what she was thinking. He turned to the humans. " TARDIS technology had never been my strong suit at the Academy," he said as he tried to justify his lack of knowledge back then. " I stole the TARDIS because it wasn't one of the most heavily guarded ones."

" Oh, so that's why you stole the TARDIS so easily," Romana nodded in comprehension.

The Doctor shook himself out of the direction the conversation had taken. " Gallifrey had this matrix, a computer system that stored all their knowledge," the Doctor paused, he knew his description of the matrix wasn't perfect, but it was the best description he could come up with, " and the Master had broken into it. He managed to remove quite a few files. One was about the Sea Devils, a colony of the race that ruled the Earth before your race evolved. Anyway," he added, holding up his hand to stop Martha from asking anymore questions; the Doctor could see Martha's inability to wait and see and always ask questions would slow him down as he explained what the Time War was all about. He wanted to get this out of the way. " The Master had stolen a report on the Exarian Doomsday weapon, it can convert suns into supernovas. I managed to persuade the keeper of the weapon from handing it over to the Master. He destroyed it, along with his race." He looked down sadly, even if the incident had stopped the Master's plan of carving an empire out of ashes it had resulted in the destruction of an entire race.

Martha had heard of genocide before, but the Doctor had just described how he'd practically ordered it to happen. Romana heard the thoughts in her head, and frowned. " It didn't happen like that, Martha," she warned, knowing how judgemental the doctor in training could be. " The Exarians had been a powerful race once, but their society had begun to decay and degenerate. By the time the Doctor and the Master arrived, the whole planet was virtually dead, and there was a colony of struggling humans there trying to make a decent life for themselves, but the power source of the weapon was poisoning the soil of the planet. The Exarians asked the Doctor to destroy them, not the other way around."

Martha didn't like the contradiction to what the Doctor had said. " He said-"

" Persuade the keeper of the weapon from handing it over to the Master, I didn't say anything about them killing themselves." The Doctor interrupted. He hadn't been surprised by Romana's detailed knowledge of what had happened before she'd met him, the Matrix contained knowledge about all the Time Lords, and Romana had said she'd studied his biography before joining him to search for the Key to Time. " Besides the weapon had brought nothing but harm to the Exarians, it had poisoned them. They worshipped the bloody thing, even made sacrifices to it. The Keeper had had enough of it, when the Master came he realised if his people died then it would be used in ways the Exarians would have never wanted. Besides it gave him the excuse to end the Exarians' history."

The Doctor glared at the now uncomfortable Martha. She knew she had a problem with judging people before she'd gotten the full story. Jack, sensing the tension, spoke up. " What else, Doc?"

The Doctor turned his glare to the former time agent. " Don't call me Doc!" He retorted, yelping in surprise when Romana elbowed him none too softly. Romana was nonchalent when she saw the glare turned in her direction. " Get on with it, please."

Realising he'd spent too long not getting to the point, the Doctor nodded. " The Master breaking into the matrix changed nothing for Time Lord security, just like it did when I tricked the Vardans into invading Gallifrey." Romana had to laugh at the looks on her companion's faces.

Jack had to double check what he'd heard, he had to be imagining what he'd heard. " You helped an alien race invade Gallifrey, your homeplanet?" The time agent asked.

The Doctor nodded. " Why?" Jack asked.

For a while the Doctor didn't reply, but when he spoke his voice demanded silence, even from Romana who rembembered the incident despite it not really affecting her during her final year at the Prydonian Academy.

" Like I said when I described what happened with the War Lords, I'd noticed just how my people had become complacent, especially when dealing with difficult situations," The Doctor turned to Romana. He knew she knew their people hadn't taken the Time War seriously until it was far too late, even when the Daleks had sabotaged her earlier work with the temporal powers the Time Lords had done little in the aftermath even when dozens of their people had been killed. Still looking at Romana, the Doctor carried on, seeming to be apologetic at the same time for reasons beyond Martha's ability to understand.

" I set up a little game," he said, though when his mouth said the word game it sounded just wrong, but it seemed like the best word he could pick out of his vocabulary. " I set myself up as president, and once my induction was more or less finished, I would bring the Vardans through. The whole point was to shake the Time Lords up, and say to them the universe was moving whilst we weren't." He sighed. " I worked with the Vardans, and when I revealed them to the High Council, there was no reaction. Nothing. Even when another enemy came to Gallifrey, the general population was apathetic."

Romana nodded. " The new regime, brief as it was, went unnoticed, but it made people speak about the Doctor more. He was a legend during my time at the Academy, how he'd rebelled against the Time Lords, and stole the TARDIS."

Jack was struggling to understand the stupidity of the Time Lords. The Higher races still spoke of the Time Lords, the Monan Host certainly spoke about the more powerful race of time travellers. He knew the Time Lords from whispers, rumours, and legends spanning space and time, but those were still whispers. It wasn't until he'd met Romana, a real person from that legendary and mythical species that he'd gained some answers. What Jack could not believe was that a species who'd gone to so much trouble to create a universe spanning wormhole would simply turn their backs and ignore the rest of the universe.

It was madness.

The former Time agent looked closely at the tired Time Lord sitting beside Romana, how the Time Lady was wrapped around him. As someone genetically engineered to give out strong pheromones and desired sex, Jack could see the attraction between the Doctor and Romana, and that was even before he and Martha had seen them kiss.

But he was still stunned by how stupid the Time Lords were to just stand by and watch as their planet was invaded. Shaking his head, Jack looked straight at the Doctor.

" Doctor," he said, keeping silent until the Time Lord looked him in the eye. Jack ignored it when he visibly winced. " Who was this other enemy?"

The Doctor's voice was grim.

" Sontarans. They sent a whole battlefleet. They used the Vardans because of their superior technical superiority to get to Gallifrey. I didn't know about them until it was too late."

Martha looked between the solemn Time Lords and the shocked time agent, and frowned. " Who are the Sontarans?"

" The finest warriors you'll ever find," the Doctor sat back. " A clone race, with the weakness of a small hole at the back of their necks, but they see it as a strength because they have to always face their enemies. The Vardans would never have been able to fight them properly, the Sontarans are too strong."

Something occured to Jack.

" Romana, the Sontarans are always on the lookout for time travel technology. Did they attack Gallifrey for your races technology, and did they fight in the Time War?"

One time when Jack had been part of the agency, he and another agent had travelled back in time when the timeline sensors had detected a serious deviant. When they got there they found a couple of Sontarans from a scout fighter. They'd crashed on the planet, and they carelessly looked into the future for slave labour and higher technology to repair their ship and to attack the Rutans because the planet was so close to the frontlines.

Jack remembered how they'd captured him and his partner, and showed interest in the vortex manipulators. He wasn't surprised, Osmic projects was crude, impractical and dangerous.

Somehow he wasn't surprised to discover the Sontarans had known about the Time Lords, so it was possible some of their plans and operations revolved around acquiring time travel technology, and very high grade at that.

If the Sontarans knew of the Time Lords, then they certainly knew of the Time war...

" Answering your questions in order. Yes, the Sontarans attacked Gallifrey for our technology, and no they didn't fight in the Time war." Romana replied.

The Doctor nodded, agreeing with Romana. " The Sontarans have tried to get their hands on time travel technology for a long time. They sponsored experiments on Space Station Chimmera in the Third Zone for a space and time machine. Something far more sophisticated than the pieces of junk the Sontarans used, but the Time Lords sent me to stop them because of the dangerous levels of energy they were releasing, affecting the fabric of space/time. When the Time war came around, many of the battles took place in space, and they attracted the attention of races like the Sontarans and their enemies, the Rutans. Both races were interested in joining the fight, but both the Time Lords and the Daleks agreed against it."

" Why?" Martha asked, folding her arms. " If both sides have fighting each other for-"

" 50,000 years," Jack put in helpfully.

Martha looked at him stunned by the figure. " They...fought for 50,000 years?"

Jack nodded grimly. " They still do," he said grimly. He'd seen the results of Sontaran-Rutan battles, planets blackened, ruined, whole cities of innocent people slaughtered because they were caught in the middle.

" If one side had joined in the Time war, then the other side would've join the opposite." The Doctor replied grimly, answering Martha's original question. " The Time war was bad enough without having a separate war fighting alongside. The Daleks knew that, and it was one of the few things we agreed on, to keep the Sontarans and Rutans out of it."

Martha bit her lip, thinking about it. She nodded, seeing the logic. " Okay," she sighed. " How did the war start?"

The Doctor sighed. " The Time Lords had been growing concerned. We foresaw a time where the Daleks would have destroyed all forms of life in the universe, and become the dominant species. It was a feasible possibility, I'd already fought the Daleks, and their empire was always expanding. There was always a number of wars that required tremendous supplies of chemicals and metals, not to mention adequate slave labour." The Time Lord looked down at his feet. " I saw two invasions of your planet Martha, one where the Daleks had attacked directly, and another in a defunct timeline. The Daleks forced humanity into a slave race, digging up your planet for raw materials to keep the Dalek Empire going."

Romana touched the Doctor's mind, urging him to get to the point.

" The Time Lords were also becoming concerned by how the Daleks were studying time travel, how they used it to conquer planets, and even going back in time to avert defeats." The Doctor sighed, guilt and self recrimination tearing him to shreds. " I was sent back in time to a point where the Daleks were about to be created."

" The Time Lords wanted your to avert their creation." Jack nodded. It made sense, but what didn't make sense was the failure. The Daleks had still been created.

" Or affect their genetic development to make them less aggressive," the Doctor agreed. " I failed to make much of a difference, and what difference I made was not the type I wanted."

He closed his eyes.

" Why, what happened?" Martha asked.

The Doctor opened his eyes, glaring into space. When he spoke his voice may have been spoken from afar. " Davros, the evil thing who created the Daleks, took our being there as a sign. A sign his creations were meant for great things, if aliens form the future were trying to meddle in their development." The Doctor sighed in exhaustion. " My meddling had created a new timeline to the original. In the original, the Daleks had exploded a neutron bomb to destroy their enemies on the planet. They built a city, convinced they were the supreme beings of the planet Skaro. To those particular Daleks there was no such thing as life on other worlds, but then I arrived and changed that.

" When they discovered there was life elsewhere, the Daleks sought to conquer them." The Doctor's dead eyes turned to Martha, who shivered when their eyes met. " The Daleks conquered Earth at that time."

He looked down at his feet again, lost in his thoughts. " In the new timeline, Davros reprogrammed his Daleks in preparation to conquer the planets he now knew were inhabited. He removed several key limitations the Daleks had suffered from, the most notable was their power problem. Originally the Daleks were powered by static electricity through charged metal flooring. Davros changed that, gave them cosmic powering that the Daleks in the original timeline would never develop for centuries. When I left, Davros had made a couple of mistakes. One was when he programmed their genetic matrix, he programmed them to believe all other races were inferior, and to exterminate them. He forgot he was, to his creations, inferior. They shot him, but he survived. Survived to lead in the Time War. The second mistake was the Daleks themselves. Davros made the Daleks in this new timeline so logical, so mechanical that they forgot their own organic heritage. This way of thinking slowed them down to a massive extent, and some of their wars in the original timeline never happened, or if they did then their logical thinking got in the way."

Neither Romana or the Doctor had any intention of mentioning the war with the Movellans. " The Daleks somehow discovered the Time Lord's meddling in their development," the Doctor said instead. " They began waging a cold war with us, even going so far as to try and kidnap me and my companions at the time, to send us back to Gallifrey to open the planet up for invasion. I got back at them for tricking Davros into destroying Skaro's sun, but the planet survived."

The Doctor wanted to get to the war itself, but he didn't know how. Romana took the initiative.

" The Time war began with a number of attacks in the time vortex. The TARDISes were captured by the Daleks, and the Time Lords were killed or tortured for information. It's believed the Daleks had already got hold of an old TARDIS, a Type 36, and developed from it. They also managed to steal certain files from our matrix, and they developed from them. With those files came knowledge and information about certain dangerous artefacts left behind over the aeons by powerful races. Artefacts the Daleks could use."

The Doctor nodded. " Despite being old and crude compared to our later models, the Type 36 and under were far more advanced than the pieces of crap the Daleks used." He looked surprised at his language as it wasn't common for him. He turned to Romana. She was grinning cheekily despite the current topic. " I see this one has a foul mouth," she smirked. " I love it." Romana leant in and captured his lips, and he too leant closer to properly kiss her.

They were just getting in their stride, too, when Jack coughed. " Later guys, the story." The two Time Lords broke apart, nonplussed. Romana sent him a smirk, and a telepathic message. Later, Doctor. The Doctor smiled back, using one of his fingers to stroke her face, eliciting a smile. Looking forward to it, Romana.

Reluctantly they broke away, the Doctor sitting up whilst Romana looked demure like nothing had happened. " The Time Lords sent a diplomatic envoy to Skaro, against my wishes I might add," Romana hissed the last part. The Doctor put a hand on her shoulder, and she relaxed, giving him a grateful look.

" What would you have to do with it?" Martha asked.

Romana glowered angrily, but not at Martha. Her anger was directed at the incompetent fools who'd sat in the Council chamber back home.

" I was the Lady President of Gallifrey," she took delight in stunning the human. " Under my leadership we'd been preparing for a war," Romana ignored the disagreeing snort from the Doctor. She knew how he'd hated being chased through time and space because of Compassion being a living TARDIS, but she'd had no other choice. " Only I got it wrong. It was the Daleks we were going to fight. We'd known about the impending war for a long time, but we had no idea we'd get it so wrong."

" We found out, though, when the Daleks sent a corpse of one of the Time Lords back for us to find, only for the body to explode in a fusion blast," The Doctor pointed out grimly. He looked at the two humans. " The explosion destroyed a large portion of the Capitol, our city, and a Dalek battlefleet launched a massive attack on Gallifrey itself, getting past our defences as easily as if they weren't there. They used nuclear weapons, frying massive areas of the planet in nuclear fire. After that the Time Lord's declared war. It was the only thing we could do."

He looked down at his hands.

Romana's voice was quiet. " We sent out a call for all our people offworld, to come and help us fight." She looked down. " None of us wanted to, the Time Lord race had been at peace for centuries. None of us knew the first thing about war, but we tried."

" For the first year, the Time Lords didn't concern themselves much with the war," the Doctor said darkly. " We thought, since we'd defeated enemies in the past, the Daleks would be easy. They ignored the counsel of those who'd met the Daleks, fought them again and again. We could destroy one Dalek army, only for seven more to take their place. The Time Lords began taking the war seriously enough when the Daleks started going for the higher races more powerful artefacts, including our own. Dalek scientists and warriors were sent to them to take control, and use them as weapons to use in the war."

" To slow us down, the Daleks routinely sent their ships and time vessels on kamikaze missions," Romana added. " They even developed an Attero device."

" They didn't?" Jack breathed.

Martha looked between the time agent and the Time Lords, confused. " What's an Attero device?"

The Doctor sighed. " Attero, in Latin, means " I destroy" or I weaken," they're basically devices that generate a dangerous type of interference that interferes in the basic operations of a ships propulsion. In the case of the Time War, the Daleks used the frequency of a TARDIS'S dematerialisation or rematerialisation, and the TARDIS would explode, killing the Time Lords inside them."

Romana and the Doctor looked sad. " It took seven years before we could properly find and destroy the Attero device. It was phased in and out of the Time Vortex. In that time, the Time Lords had started to recognise how serious the war was. With our TARDIS and time technology immobilised, the Daleks were able to launch vicious assaults on Gallifrey, and many of our people were stranded off world, fighting the Daleks. Some races pitched into help, the Monan Host for instance. Their powerful ships were able to help us with our operations, but we had to be careful. The Monan Host wanted to remain strictly neutral, if one of their ships was found then the Daleks would turn their attentions towards them."

" By the time the device had been destroyed," the Doctor continued, " an estimate of over 3,000 Time Lords and Ladies, many of them half trained soldiers, were killed. By then we'd started developing weapons to take on the Daleks themselves. The Rani developed a number of viruses to attack Dalek casings. A device that would act like a neutron bomb, but destroy the targetted DNA. We changed the travel frequencies of the TARDISes to random, so another Attero device would never be used again."

" We started destroying suns, converting them into black holes near Dalek facilities; labs, shipyards, factory complexes, the lot. The Daleks laid traps for us, and after falling for them where hundreds of us died, we began making traps of our own. We started rigging our artefacts the Daleks were going after, to explode and take them with it. We weren't going to let our history be tarnished, not by the Daleks." Romana said.

For a moment both Time Lords fell silent, but Martha grew impatient very quickly.

" Go on, what happened then?"

The Doctor and Romana looked at one another. " You have to understand, Martha, that in a Time War, time itself is a weapon." Romana said. " We started by rewriting time, creating multiple timelines, and trying to force some of them."

The Doctor nodded. He hadn't approved of that, but it had worked on more than one occasion. " At first the timelines written were to allow us greater latitude in the war, to help us win. Whenever the Daleks developed some new superweapon, and used in during the war, we would simply program time to simply erase it, or make it less powerful. Unfortunately those casings the Daleks used had been modified with Time Lord technology and science to allow them to see multiple timelines, so the idea fell flat. But paradoxes were used against them, to wipe out key and important events in history."

" But the Daleks had developed the means and the power to create and force alternate realities," Romana said. " We had to send a number of Time Lords back through time to ensure the new events never happened."

The Doctor smiled though it didn't reach his eyes. " I don't know how many alternate timelines I found, where the Daleks tried to kill me and my family, preventing my birth, but I was delighted when I found and destroyed their reality manipulator.

Romana added. " And we managed to create a timeline loop to prevent the Daleks from creating another one."

Martha and Jack had been growing quite stunned by how the pair of them finished each others sentences, almost as if they time it. " Timeline loop?" Martha asked.

The Doctor smiled, and held out his hands, and made a figure eight with a few lines through it. " A time loop is where you pass continually through the same points through time, but a timeline loop is where there is no way out. It also creates a very basic but powerful timelock to prevent anyone from breaking through."

Romana glanced at him, then she carried on. " In the very first year of the Time war, Davros the creator of the Daleks was lost to the Nightmare Child, and the Attero device had been activated, but I count twenty years later the war had become incredibly complex."

The Doctor stood up. " I think we should take this to the kitchens. I'm thirsty, and I need a cuppa."

Romana stood up as well. " Definitely."

The two humans watched as the Time Lords marched out, and they shrugged and followed.

* * *

Nursing their teas, the Doctor and Romana carried on with their grim tale of the Time War. The Doctor sipped his tea, apparently in no hurry to speak. Romana took the hot seat.

" The Time Lords realised we needed spies in the war, and none of our people could be sent without discovery and extermination. We managed to infiltrate a few Dalek factories, and we reprogrammed the mutants genetic structure to make them obey us. We gave them a simple directive, to fight against the Daleks."

" Only we didn't know what the consequences would be," the Doctor set down his mug. " I was on that mission. I added the human factor, the total opposite of the Dalek factor, the distillation of everything that makes a Dalek a Dalek. The Daleks had once captured me with the intention of spreading the Dalek factor through human history, essentially making humans into Daleks. Anyway I passed the factor on, and the Daleks caused massive chaos within the Empire and they began fighting each other on their planets, and on the frontlines. It wasn't exactly the mission directive, but the reprogrammed Daleks were able to move undetected to carry out their spying missions."

The Doctor smiled. " I later, with the Rani and Drax's help, managed to create a device that would generate a wave through the time vortex, to every Dalek in the universe. It mixed a part of the human factor into the unsuspecting mind of the Daleks, and make them conflicted. Eventually they killed themselves when they realised they'd 'become contaminated." He mimicked a Dalek's voice.

Romana hit him on the arm. " I loved that one. It was nice seeing the Daleks lose some of that superiority complex, and become more playful."

The Doctor grinned, then it fell off as quickly as a raindrop on glass. " It didn't work, though," he took a sip of his tea before he carried on. " The Dalek emperor, seeing what was about to happen, but helpless to prevent it, hid inside a pocket universe with a massive and growing Dalek army. They identified what I'd done, and made themselves immune. The time between the Emperor's reemergence into the war, and the two factors working against one another was long enough to give us a respite. When the war came back, we were unprepared."

" Matters grew worse," Romana said grimly. The others looked at her, and she looked down at her milky tea. " I was fighting off world, something I did regularly. The High council of the Time Lords were useless at the best of times, but during the war they were even worse. They continuously refused to send reinforcements, sponsored weapon and scientific ideas that made no difference to the outcome of the war, so I often found myself leaving them to fight alongside my people. I was always protected, but the High Council saw me as a renegade, not a president.

" They made a plan without my knowledge. This is where the Master comes in. Time Lords have twelve regenerations, thirteen lives before we die completely, and the Master had used his up. He was continuously looking for new ways to prolong his life, eventually he tried to steal the Doctor's regenerations. He failed, and he was believed to have fallen into the Eye of Harmony inside this TARDIS. His mind survived, and the Time Lords brought him back, gave him a cloned body, and made him the perfect warrior for the war."

Romana sighed, and looked and felt physically and mentally weaker than ever. " I got back just in time for the Master to be sent to the frontlines, and I met him briefly. He didn't say a word, he just left. I was furious. I demanded the truth, and the High Council revealed it in the shape of someone I hadn't expected."

The Doctor took her hand. He knew where she was going with this. " The High Council had now decided to resurrect the dead," Romana said. " The ease by which they brought the Master back to life made them see that deceased Time Lords could help, and they started bringing back Time Lords who'd died thousands of years before, and even later. Some of them were renegades, mavericks, and their contributions was more than a help."

The Time Lady shook her head, shaking her brunette hair side to side. " The Resurrection project wasn't a total success; the Master had been sent on a vital mission to safeguard the Cruciform. Vortex knows how the Daleks found out about it, they probably learnt about it via the captured records they'd stolen. Anyway the Master had been sent to ensure it never fell into Dalek hands."

" It fell, anyway," The Doctor said grimly, though both Martha and Jack had already gathered that.

" Why did the Master go?" Jack asked.

" The Master was always concerned by number one," the Doctor ground out angrily. He'd personally led a team to try and retake the Cruciform, but he'd been beaten back. " My guess is he got frightened when he saw the whole thing was beyond his ability to stand, so he escaped. Ran to the end of the universe. If only I'd made the connection." He smacked the table in frustration, making Martha and Jack jump. Romana hadn't moved, she felt the same way.

Martha frowned. " If you'd been destroying your own artefacts, why try and preserve this one?"

" Good question," Jack added, looking closely at the Time Lords.

The Doctor and Romana looked at each other, not wanting to really get into the grubby part of Time Lord history. But since the instigator was coming up, Romana decided to get it over with.

" The Master was just an experiment, to see if bringing people back to life was possible," she laid it all down slowly so the humans could get the idea without it being in a rush. " Despite his...desertion, he was a success. The High Council used the success to bring Omega and Rassilon back. We were that desperate."

" Hold on," Jack held up his hands. " You brought back your founders, one lost in the antimatter universe?"

The Doctor nodded. " Only his mind was brought back, and he was given a new body."

Romana sighed. " Rassilon took my place on the council, and I let it go with dignity. Not because he was a hero to the Time Lords, but because I'd grown sick and tired of the ingrates."

The Doctor snorted. Romana ignored him, promising to punish him later.

" Rassilon took power, and Omega joined us at the front." She frowned. " Funny, you hear legends about those two, how they worked together in a team to make Gallifrey the foremost temporal power in the cosmos, and yet the pair could barely stand each other."

The Doctor snorted again, but this time had something meaningful to add. " I was there, when those two stood before the Council, and I wasn't the only person to notice the contempt between those two, despite their smiles. Susan and Rani commented on it, being granddaughter and grandmother. I tried asking Omega about it, but he wouldn't speak about it. I actually grew to like him, despite our past history. Nice bloke. He also made Rani smile." Romana and the Doctor looked disturbed by the thought.

" Past history?"

The Doctor smiled grimly as he answered Martha's question. " Oh, he went mad inside the antimatter universe, alone, and with no one for company. He tried to drain Gallifrey of its energy, and three versions of me stopped him. Later, he tried to come back, but I stopped him again."

Romana got in before the Doctor was forced into answering anymore questions. " Omega got straight to work, he began by discovering distant suns he could use in a weapon he'd dreamt up to destroy the Daleks and end the war."

The Doctor groaned, catching Romana's eyes. " And then Rassilon made that speech, do you remember? That speech where he said the Daleks would never attack Gallifrey whilst he was there?"

Romana groaned this time. " How am I going to forget it?"

Jack got in before the Cruciform question got lost in the mist of the Time War story. " Hey!"

Both Time Lords looked at him irritably. Jack didn't let that phase him, " Can you get to the point of the Cruciform?"

They blinked, they'd forgotten about that. Jack rolled his eyes.

" One of the many contributions to why our people started developing and studying time travel, was because some of us had the power to see into the furture." The Doctor began. " That ability has dimmed over the centuries, so the Time Lords used time technology to look into the future. That's what Rassilon did, and why he created the Cruciform."

" Rassilon saw a race that would eventually become more powerful than the Time Lords. He called them the Divergence, but he never bothered to find out anything about them, except they would have eventually become more powerful than us," Romana continued. " To prevent that from happening, he created a metastructure in the shape of a cross. The Cruciforms arms are 8,000 miles long, dimensionally transcendental, and it sat inside a pocket within the time vortex."

" Yeah, but what did it do?" Martha asked, looking between the two exasperatedly.

The Doctor frowned. " Have neither of you noticed that nearly every race in the universe are humanoid, two arms, hands, legs, and eyes, and even look the same? That's what Rassilon did. He spread biogenic molecules through the Cruciform to every point in the universe, using the time vortex to make it possible. Since then humanoid life have followed the Gallifreyan pattern of evolution."

Jack looked at the Time Lords with horror. " Your people deliberately meddled with the evolution with other species, just to stop one race from becoming better than you?"

Neither Romana or the Doctor had anything to refute what Jack had just asked, they knew it was the truth.

For himself, a man who prided himself on his open mind and his desire to explore, the Doctor had always found that particular chapter of Time Lord history both disturbing and horrendous. It was one thing for the Rani to create a planet sized time manipulator, kidnapping the most intelligent geniuses from various times and places, but at least she'd been honest about her aims.

Unlike Rassilon.

Despite what Rassilon had done to the Divergence, the Doctor couldn't help but feel grateful that the Time Lord's biological pattern of humanoid anatomy had spawned some of the most amazing forms of life in existence, even if the means was a little impure.

Romana had always prided herself on being a perfect Time Lady, but she knew she was sometimes anything but perfect. The Time Lady had known for decades how her people had stopped being perfect, if they ever were and she definitely felt some skepticism on that front. The Cruciform's function had angered her when she'd gained the Presidency because it wasn't something you learnt about in the Academy.

To the Time Lords, the Cruciform was just another super sized thing floating in the time vortex, and no one truly knew what use it had. It had surprised, not to mention disturbed the renegades, Romana and Omega amongst them, because the races they'd visited and interacted with before the Time war had been, in essence, created by the Time Lord founder. Omega, to her surprise, had been repulsed Rassilon would go so far. He'd confided in her and the Rani that the whole point of the vortex project was to experience diversity. What disturbed Romana the most was the lack of response from the other Time Lords who'd remained at home, their attitude hinting that because they were the most advanced race in the cosmos they had the right.

The Doctor nodded grimly. " Yes, but not all of us thought that way."

" Didn't stop you though, did it?"

" Stop it, Jack." Romana ordered. Jack shut up, Romana was in Ice Queen mode, and she did not look happy. " It doesn't matter anymore because the Cruciform has been destroyed, its been gone since the Time war ended. We destroyed it ourselves, didn't we?" She looked over at the Doctor, holding out her hand. Gratefully the Doctor took it. " Yeah," he breathed.

" What happened?" Martha asked.

The Doctor sighed. " The Daleks got wind of the Cruciform, I think from the Matrix records since TARDIS records don't describe how it worked, or even what it did. When they found out it was a biogenic manipulator of immense size and power, they saw it as a means to create new Dalek armies. The Daleks have always been steeped in racial purity, but the war blurred those lines. The Daleks needed new troops, armies, and fleets to continue the war."

" Imagine it, Martha, Jack," Romana looked grim as she added to her human companions. " Imagine being your usual human selves, and then you begin to change. Your thoughts change from being who you are, what your emotions and personality make you, and turn you away from things like love and happiness, to anger, hatred of anyone or anything different. Your mind jumps its IQ, but you join a growing group who feel the same. You willingly pulp and sift your own bodies so that one cell in a billion, the only one fit to be nurtured is placed inside a Dalek casing, ready and born to kill and destroy."

Martha and Jack felt cold, remembering their similar encounters with the Daleks. Martha recalled Dalek Sec, the leader of the Cult of Skaro had tried to recreate his race and give them a life outside the shell. Martha remembered her fear of the Daleks, then Sec began to change. At first the Dalek scientist had seen humans as being a non mutated version of the Daleks, but then he experienced compassion for the first time. That compassion saved Romana from being exterminated, but in the end it didn't help him or the new Human-Daleks from being killed when the other members of the Cult killed them for being different.

Martha had grown up in a world that was constantly fighting a battle of differences; black people may have rights in some countries, but there was always a number who hated people with dark skin. Martha herself had never felt it, but that before she'd ended up in 1913 as Romana's maid. It sickened her, the ignorance and pettiness.

Memories of Rose transmatted off the Gamestation, to end up on Dalek ship a light year away from the solar system, to hearing the Dalek Emperor who Romana had been horrified and furious to learn had survived the war that claimed her race, and what had happened to the various unfortunates who'd been transported to the growing Dalek fleet, only to have everything about them purged and destroyed...they now came back with this new information. Jack had seen dozens of genetic experiments, heard of races who, instead of leaving behind wisdom, had chosen to merely continue their species by lacing their planets with genetic viruses to effectively rewrite their biology into an exact copy of the race who'd died out.

There was nothing wrong, Jack thought, about trying to survive. It was the law of the universe, to survive. Eat, or be eaten. Kill or be killed. The universe was littered with races that fought over land and resources, in that respect humanity was no different.

What Jack hated about the Daleks was they were happy to exterminate lifeforms because they went against their belief the Daleks were superior and all others were automatically inferior. It was ironic they were willing to break their own rules, ignore centuries of genetic manipulation simply to fight a war, but if the situation called for it, as the Emperor Jack had met, and during the Time War, then it was possibly justified.

Didn't mean Jack had to like it.

He liked his body, granted it was a bitch to die and come back, not to mention painful. He liked waking up in the morning, eat and drink, flirt and smile. Especially with Ianto, but that didn't mean he often didn't check out Gwen and Tosh's bums when they weren't aware of it.

Daleks had no such thing as romance, and Jack had no idea how he could live without that part of himself. His flirting, his 51st century philosophy was the core of his being. To be without it was obsene. Part of him hated the Time Lords for interfering with evolution, but he hated the possibility of what the Daleks would've done with such a device.

The idea of him being locked inside a cold metal shell, not feeling sunlight on his face, the cool air on his skin, never feeling raindrops, or the ice cold of ice or snow...

Jack remembered only too well when Romana had sent Rose back in the TARDIS, how Jack had found out. The emperor taunting Romana about the Delta wave, to his own realisation of the range of the whole Gamestation had horrified Jack, but Romana had reminded both the Dalek and him the human race still had colonies. But if Romana had let them live then the Daleks would endanger the whole universe, turning humans into a growing Dalek army. " You see, Jack?" He remembered Romana saying to him, her hair cropped short in her previous life. " The Delta wave is the only way, my only choice...It's the decision I've gotta make for every living being down there. Die as a human, live as a Dalek. Would you choose death as you are, or would you want to live a life in a cold metal cage, stripped of every thought with your mind and body twisted by chemicals and radioactivity?"

Jack's answer was to keep working.

" The Master was sent to the Cruciform to ensure it never happened, though he, like everyone else didn't know what the Cruciform could do," Romana said, getting to her part of the story.

Something rang in Martha's mind. " Hold on," she held up her hand to stop anymore of the story. " If he didn't know what it was, and you didn't either, why go?"

" The High Council of the Time Lords was built on a government formed by Rassilon personally," the Doctor replied, gazing at Martha as though wondering why the humans hadn't worked this all out for themselves. It should have been perfectly obvious. " That means the Council followed a strict list of rules, and scriptures laid down by Rassilon to do certain things, one of which is to protect the Cruciform, at all costs. No reason was given, but the fact its signed by Rassilon himself is influence enough."

" So, what happened?" Jack asked.

" The Cruciform fell," Romana said simply, picking up her tea to take a sip. It was cold, but she ignored it and took a gulp. " The Strike force was gone, we later found they were dead when we got there. And the Master had run away."

The Doctor growled. " He was always running away when things slipped past his precious control," he sneered. " Only this time he made a fatal mistake. Too many people died because of what he'd done there than in the past, and he'll pay for it." A dark glint appeared in his eyes, and it frightened Romana.

Romana didn't like the man she loved vengeful; she took hold of his hand, and squeezed. " Yeah," she agreed, knowing that the Master should pay for his crimes, but not with the penalty the Doctor had in his eyes. " He should pay." She added quietly, a similar dark vengeance in her eyes.

Martha was getting nervous at seeing the two so dark, dangerous and vengeful. She was about to say something, when they snapped out of on their own.

" Luckily for the cosmos, when the Daleks got the Cruciform, they had to work out how the damn thing worked," Romana carried on as if the episode had never happened. " It gave us the time we needed to get things going, and sort it out."

" We'd captured a DARDIS, the Dalek version of a TARDIS," The Doctor said, " and we went out to try and get the Cruciform back, but unfortunately there were problems with Gallifrey."

" What kind of problems?"

" The speech Rassilon gave out had been poorly timed," Romana replied with a sad and angry smile. " Within a week of him saying that, the Daleks attacked Gallifrey. They launched a massive assault, with their most powerful war and time vessels, and shattered the transduction barriers around our homeworld. Gallifrey had already suffered extensive bombing raids that put the Blitz to shame, and we had no clear or defined protection, though a number of weapons we'd managed to make from reverse engineered Dalek technology was used to try and destroy the Dalek fighters."

" The Daleks were driven off," the Doctor said, finally coming into the story. " But they left a lot of damage, and Rassilon was furious. None of the renegades said a word to him, though he clearly heard us say in our minds " its your fault, you stupid bastard," but it made no difference. The dome covering our city had already suffered tremendous damage, but that attack shattered it. Dalek saucers littered the burning valley between the Mountains of Solice and Solitude, compared to the general size of the city's dome, they were like leaves on the ground during autumn. The Daleks had started using pocket universes pushed out of time to build their ships, their new technologies, and we were unable to get in with our viewing equipment which we used to study timeperiods and have a look. So our scientists had to scavenge the wrecks to study the technologies, and to make new weapons and defences."

" And all this was going on as you were getting to the Cruciform?" Martha asked, trying to get the timing right.

" Correct." Romana nodded, but the Doctor's face darkened. " They created their own army and fleet to attack Gallifrey, it was easily the largest yet, and the Time Lords could barely fight them. The attack lasted for days, but when it was finally beaten off and thousands of Daleks littered the landscape, the Time Lords learnt the Daleks had left behind a number of factories, dimensionally transcendental factories containing enough material to build new Dalek armies."

Romana's eyes glazed as the Time Lady remembered how their people had not realised the danger until it was too late. Besides it wasn't really their fault entirely; the previous Dalek assault had caused far more damage than the Time Lords had been able to cope with. Their planet had never known such devastation in aeons, the Time Lords were simply ill-equipped to deal with any of it.

Rassilon hadn't been much help either, but he'd done his best. Romana had to give him credit for trying to deal with some of the damage. She knew he'd invested a great deal of his time and energies working on the Dalek technology captured to find defences and means to fighting the Daleks back more effectively, dealing crippling blows.

The transduction barriers were modified to accept only Time Lord technology and DNA from getting in, but the danger of the factory vessels left behind by the Daleks wasn't known until the ground suddenly ripped across the citadel, and an army of Daleks streamed out chanting ' exterminate.' The Doctor's voice broke through her thoughts. " Those of us fighting offworld heard about the invasion when the transduction barriers were closed off. By then of course the Cruciform mission was underway, and it was too late to change our minds. In any case, I had a plan of sorts.

**_Flashback._**

The Doctor frowned as he and Rani, with Omega's help, worked on the Cruciforms' robotic control systems. The design of the controls were Ancient Time Lord, or Gallifreyan, and to the Doctor's annoyance his knowledge of the ancient systems of his people was rather limited. Rani was closed off, occasionally asking Omega to help her for something, though the Doctor could tell she and the founder were flirting. Despite this being a bad time, the Doctor was happy for the pair of them.

Omega, the Doctor was glad to see, had already become a great help. His knowledge of ancient Time Lord technology was proving invaluable.

There was only one problem.

The burnt out ruins of numerous Dalek casings. The scientists and Warriors assigned here to work on the Cruciform were nothing more than smoking remains.

" Damn it," Susan cursed angrily, jumping in her chair with frustration.

Omega came over to her at once. " What is it?" He asked gently. The ancient Time Lord had quickly become fond of Susan, mostly because she was a more innocent and childlike version of the woman he'd come to love.

Susan glanced up at him, her face tinged with soot. " The Daleks have put some of their technology in to override the Cruciform's systems, but the works patchy. I'm trying to get it out, but the Daleks are paranoid and overly cautious. Their technology is geared the same way. I've counted eighty-nine different traps, and it's slowing me down."

Omega bent down to help her work. She glanced at him. " So," she began awkwardly, her voice low so no one could hear her. " You and my grandmother..."

Omega quirked a brow. He was pleased by his new body, but he was more than happy there was a Time Lady he could relate to. Rani and he had much in common. His relationship with the Doctor was no longer strained, and he'd quickly found he enjoyed the other's company, something that surprised him. He didn't blame the Doctor for his actions, now his mind had been healed by the tele-physicians.

His relationship with Susan was growing as well, and he'd become delighted by the girl's innocence, and her cheeky way of speaking to the Rani, and get away with it, though Rani would scoff or snort, but he could see the smile on her lips.

Susan made Rani happy, so he was happy.

At times Omega wondered if the modern day Time Lady could love someone like him, but she'd surprised him.

This was the first time Susan had directly confronted him on the subject, but since he knew some people liked to talk whilst they worked, or because she was choosing this moment to speak to him, he didn't know. And he wasn't going to pry, Susan was just asking a youthful question.

" Listen," Omega said, keeping his own voice quiet. " I'm not going to-"

" Are you happy with her?" Judging from her shy expression, despite his inexperience due to spending so many thousands of years alone and trapped in an antimatter wasteland, Omega had no trouble believing the girl was trying to avoid running away and hide.

Omega sighed, concentrating on the problem infront of him rather than to his left. Susan hadn't been exaggerating when she'd said Dalek technology was paranoid. He hadn't expected a computer virus like that one, he just hoped the rest of the system hadn't been compromised. He had no idea what the Doctor had in mind, but it needed an intact, or close, Cruciform.

" Yes. I was alone, Susan. I had no one to speak to, but when I came back Rani was assigned to be my mentor in this age of Time Lords. I fell in love with her, and she with me. I could feel it. Sense it. So we-" He stopped when he saw the interest on Susan's face. Then he shrugged. " We Soul bonded."

" WHAT?" Everyone turned when they heard Susan shout, the Doctor looked like he was about to go over himself, but the Rani tugged on his shirt sleeve to get him back to work. The Rani levelled a glare at Omega, who smirked and winked at her. She huffed and turned away.

Omega turned back to Susan irritably. " Keep your voice down," he hissed.

" Sorry," the girl replied sheepishly.

Omega smiled. " I love her, Susan. You don't have anything to worry about. You don't have to call me 'grandfather' if you don't want to."

Susan smiled at him shyly. The pair of them got to work.

The Rani was working with Drax, Romana and the Doctor as they worked on a console.

Drax sighed as he leant back. " Damn Ancient Time Lord tech," he grumbled. He glared over his shoulder where Susan was working on the Dalek interface link, which was pushing nanoweeds into the system, overriding it and rewriting the computer interfaces. Gallifreyan technology was designed to be organic in nature, with physical aspects to avoid viral attacks.

The Daleks knew that.

Drax had to admit the Daleks had done their homework on the technology the Time Lords used, but he was delighted none of their work had messed with the computer he was working on. Susan had the unlucky job of identifying the sections that had been compromised, and there were many. And the number was growing.

The Doctor was also working, his eyes knitted in concentration as he tried to isolate the different parts of the Cruciform from the Dalek's sabotage.

" I know, Drax," he replied when he heard the other Time Lord swear. He didn't blame him either.

Susan called over. " I've managed to isolate the Dalek virus transmitter. I've sent a modified virus to take care of it. It should do its work in another hour."

Omega came over, towering over the others. He didn't dare wrap an arm around his bonded, though the temptation was there.

" What do you plan to do with the Cruciform, Doctor?" He asked. The Doctor, and surprisingly Rani, had come up with a plan, but they hadn't said a word, and not even his bond to Romana would tell him what was going on.

The Doctor smiled at him. " Didn't we tell you?" He asked, the smile growing on his face. The smile faded when Omega growled at him impatiently. If there was one thing Omega had become, it was patient, but there were times, like right now, that that patience disappeared. " Me and Rani have decided to turn the Cruciform into a massive genetic modification device. We discussed it on our way here, and we stole the Dalek's plan. We're going to rework it, just like the Daleks wanted to use it for, but we decided to add a few things on."

Omega quirked a skeptical brow. " Like what?"

" The Cruciform was built by Rassilon to purge the cosmos of the Divergence," Rani said. " He made sure every race followed our basic evolution-"

Omega growled, and looked away. The disgust he felt towards his fellow Time Lord founder made him physically ill. He had wanted to make his people the Lords of time, but only that.

He had no idea Rassilon would take their work and pervert it, just to ensure the Time Lords stayed on top.

Rani kept speaking as though her mate hadn't made a sound. " The Daleks planned to remake the Cruciform and use it to biologically re-engineer other races into becoming Kaleds, and then Daleks." She smirked smugly. " We've taken the idea, and we're going to turn it back on them." The evil smile that lit up her face made Omega want to drag her into another room and have his wicked way with her, but her glare made him remember he couldn't. Not unless he wanted to be castrated.

The Doctor smiled as well. " We have the basic Dalek genetic code, and we're going to also use Dalekanium. That's where the idea of the Attero device comes in."

" You mean you're going to do something to the Dalekanium that will act like an Attero Device?" Susan asked as she came over.

The Doctor nodded. " These new casings are powered by static electricity power feeds, laced with cosmic energy." He held up a data pad. " I had one of our Dalek spies get me the right frequencies of Dalekanium power feeds. The interference we generate from this device will, in theory, overload the feeds."

" Killing the Daleks," Romana smirked.

The Doctor shook his head. " That's not the only thing we're doing here, though," he added. " In the first few years of this war, the Daleks used an Attero device on us, and cost hundreds of lives."

" I heard about that," Omega nodded. " So your basically giving them a taste of their own medicine?"

The Doctor nodded grimly. " More or less, only this time instead of just ships and DARDISes, the Daleks themselves will explode. Every planet, every galaxy, everywhere. I don't know how effective it will be though, what with the Rani's hobby for genetic modification."

They turned to face the Rani, who smiled darkly. " The Daleks wanted to affect evolution, so I'm doing it for them. Only they're going to be the victims. The Cruciform will send out a wave that modifies the Daleks DNA, and make them change within those casings."

Drax leant forwards eagerly. He'd lost his cousins and sister during the war, and he wanted to see thousands of Daleks pay the price. " How will they do that?"

The Rani smiled sympathetically, not liking seeing her old school friend consumed with anger and hate, though she felt the same. " The mutants will grow inside their casings, changing every second into something else."

_**End Flashback.**_

" You didn't?" Jack gasped.

The Doctor nodded. " Our work massacred millions of Daleks," the Doctor said. " Unfortunately the war was not over. We may have destroyed the Daleks outside the transduction barriers, but there were still millions inside, and they hadn't been affected by the Cruciforms' modifications. The Cruciform exploded as we left, Omega believed the device had simply struggled to cope with the modifications it had been put through, and the Daleks work was fairly invasive."

" I can believe that," Jack muttered.

" What happened next?" Martha urged them to carry on.

The Doctor sighed as he remembered what happened next. " The Daleks that invaded Gallifrey modified the transduction barriers. For us, only eight months passed outside the fields. Inside, it was another matter."

" Eight months for us meant eight years inside for them," Romana said grimly.

" How did they manage that?"

Jack answered Martha's question. " They simply slowed down time relative to time outside the transduction barriers, right?" He asked the Doctor and Romana.

They nodded.

" We won't go into detail of how we got through - it would take too long - but we will tell you that by the time we did get through we were just in time," the Doctor. " The Time Lords had managed, for eight long years, to hold the Daleks at bay. But they were faltering, and they would have fallen if we hadn't stopped them. We destroyed the Daleks, using a downgraded Dalekanium energy weapon."

Romana breathed out sadly. " Things were never the same after that. After eight years fighting, dying, coming back, and dying again, the Time Lords started to change, and Rassilon didn't help matters. Gallifrey was put under Marshall law, which was the last thing the planet needed, but Rassilon and his yes men didn't care. They started working on reducing the rights of the people, cutting the constitution into shreds, and made plans to create new armies to ensure that Gallifrey was never invaded again. Our people started pointing the fingers to those they thought should be killed, because they didn't like them, and pretended they were Dalek agents. Nothing was done to stop it, despite our best efforts. Even children were not spared from the culling. But Rassilon was working on another plan. We didn't know what."

The Doctor sighed. " Everytime I returned home after the invasion...I just didn't recognise the planet. The atmosphere was choke with industrial fumes as the Dalek alloys, their casings and ships were burnt down to build new weapons. The forests with the silver leaves were cut down to make way for new weapon plants, TARDIS construction was put on maximum, and the there were weapon platforms hanging in the vortex at all times and in space.

On the planet there were rows after rows of weapon platforms that saw numerous reworking...But the change I saw in the Time Lords stunned me, they were becoming less and less moral, and more dangerous. The war and the occupation had changed them, scarred them..." He shook his head.

" Things got worse," Romana said before Martha or Jack asked the Doctor anything else. " The Time War had invited all kinds of horrors into joining. The Could've been King with his Army of Meanwhiles and Neverwheres, paradoxes basically, rose to power, and fought both Time Lord and Daleks. Even the Daleks, with their new time travel technology were hard pressed to fight it."

" The Eternals, almighty beings, were said to have wept at the carnage and left the universe behind," The Doctor added.

" Alternate realities were closed off to prevent the Daleks the chance to get into the multiverse, and potentially come back with a superweapon capable of winning the war, but the walls of reality were only truly sealed off completely when..." Romana glanced at the Doctor.

The Doctor nodded. " When Gallifrey was destroyed, but we've got a long way to go."

Martha and Jack hid their disappointment.

* * *

After a brief break, the Doctor and Romana moved to the lounge of the TARDIS. It was like an Edwardian sitting room, with rich wood and luxurious furnishings. There were one or two modern furnishings. Martha looked at the incongruous looking plasma television, and what looked like souvenirs the Doctor had picked up from various planets, movie and theatre posters, film souvenirs and even weird alien objects.

The Doctor sat down and sipped his drink, not in any hurry to get back on track with the story of the Time War, so it was up to Romana to start the story.

" As the Doctor said, our people began to change," she said, " and it wasn't just in the adult population. There may have been a Time war going on, but that didn't mean our children shouldn't receive an education."

Jack's gaze darkened when he caught the implication. " You used your own children as bait?"

Romana shook her head. " Not me, Jack. When the war heated up, I took it upon myself to try and send as many children off into the universe, having their time essences removed from their bodies and stored inside fob watches like the Doctor and the Master did. When the Dalek factories were found too late to stop them, a member of the council took it upon herself to continue the job, but Rassilon stopped her. He claimed they needed all the help they could get, but a three year old with a gun? I don't think so."

Martha smiled. " But surely Romana, if there are children out there, then maybe-"

" Maybe I wouldn't be alone, but the universe is a big place Martha." Romana glowered at her friend in annoyance. " Don't think it hasn't occurred to me, because it has. I've spend my time since the war looking for those same children, but there were no records so I can't exactly track them down. There was a fear the Daleks would find out. Even if I could find them, whose to say their bodies haven't already died of old age, or something? Can I really destroy an individual because they have a Time Lord essence? If I cloned their bodies, then yeah. I still have to find them though, and I've been looking for years."

The Doctor gently took her hand. Seeing she was too distraught to carry on with this painful topic, he took over. Romana had fought long and hard against what Rassilon did with their younger generations, and she'd failed because their people had seen nothing wrong with any of it, even when they began seeing what was being done to the impressionable young minds.

The problem had been was Rassilon was seen as a magical figure, and was the closest thing to a god Gallifrey ever had. Omega, not so much. The other founder had tried to use his historical influence to try and prevent what Rassilon wanted done, but a few words from Rassilon and Omega lost the battle and never tried again. " Rassilon," the Doctor began, " dissolved the chapters of the Academies, the political cores that made up Time Lord society."

" Like the houses of Hogwarts," Romana injected helpfully for her friend's benefits. She grinned at his surprise. " Tell you later."

The Doctor nodded, confused. " Right." Clearing his throat, he continued. " He left the younger initiates into the Academy alone, except for those aged 80 and above."

" 80, how long do you spend in the Academy?" Martha asked.

The Doctor's smile didn't reach his eyes. " You start at 8, finish at 312. Anyway, those young Time Lords were forced to become soldiers, but to do that Rassilon started to show his true colours. He began a series of subliminal programming into the young Time Lord's minds, augmented by drugs and deep level telepathic probings."

" He brainwashed them." Jack's voice was stunned, quiet. Dangerous.

The Doctor and Romana nodded gravely. " He did more than that, Jack," the Doctor said quietly, and just as dangerously as the former Time agent.

" Rassilon brainwashed them to the point where they could not think treasonous thoughts about him, they spouted his propaganda day in day out. He replaced the curriculum with survival training, technology, medicine, weapons training; knives, sticks, barehands, guns of various kinds, exercises, and training scenarios like you would not believe. They didn't stand a chance, the brainwashing made them accept the harsh training. There were many intense levels of training where the recruits, and they were tortured for rewards, to make them stronger. Then Rassilon began his next stages. He forcibly regenerated them."

Jack gaped, he had a basic idea of what regeneration was, but he couldn't believe it was used for this. " He killed them?"

" Twice." The Doctor replied, his anger bubbling beneath the surface of his mind. " The next incarnation was a fanatic, but when the training was finished, you received a super trained warrior. Loyal to Rassilon, and Rassilon only."

Seeing as he was too angry to carry on, Romana took up the story. " Each level of the training brought with it new challenges. Time Lords have remarkable power over their bodies. I could put myself into a self induced coma, slow down my respiration. If I was human, I'd be dead. The recruits," Romana spat out the word with contempt, " were put through dangerous training scenarios, worked to the point of exhaustion. When a Time Lord regenerates, the next body is born of the primary feelings of the last. In the case of my third regeneration, I was distraught, angry at the loss of my people, my friends, my...loved ones," the Doctor looked at her, stunned, " and angry about what my people had become."

" What those recruits felt...I don't like to think." Romana shook her head, not even daring to contemplate imagining what those poor kids had gone through.

There was a long silence, then the Doctor spoke again. " They knew their stuff, when they got to the frontlines. Rassilon considered them too valuable, so he had them placed through a cloning program to make millions of clones out of one Time Lord or Lady, taking a leaf out of the Sontarans book, to make millions of new soldiers who inherited their forebears knowledge. But the clones and their donors had been genetically and bionically engineered, enhanced. They were stronger, smarter, tougher...A single Dalek would need to fire on one of them eight times till the soldier died. But the Daleks could replace their numbers just as easily, and it took months to create a proper new clone.

" During that period, I dunno how long it was but it lasted for countless lifespans, but time was becoming blurred." He sighed. " Time. Otherwise known as the great destroyer, but in the Time war it became a reality." The Doctor glanced at Romana, then back at the humans. " The barriers of time and space were breaking down, those who died in the war came back to life, full of insanity, and-" he sighed raspily in memory, " They lived, only for them to die over and over again."

" Rassilon changed all that," Romana said quietly. " He and his council had prepared the Ultimate sanction, the end of time." She looked down, ashamed.

Martha shrugged. " What was it?" She asked quietly, knowing it couldn't be good.

Romana looked up, almost hesitantly. " The war was going badly, despite our best efforts. It didn't help matters that the Daleks lured our 'soldiers' into traps, and killed them on mass. We'd retaliated with black hole and supernova weapons, mining solar systems and destroying them, without firing a shot at the Daleks. Rassilon didn't care about that, or what Omega did. Don't ask us where he got the idea, we don't know."

" The Ultimate Sanction was dreamt up to create a rupture that would rip the Time vortex apart," the Doctor said simply, his voice cold and Martha was scared to say, detatched, as though he didn't want to think about it but had no choice.

" That's suicide," Jack gasped, imagining it. Destroying a wormhole, of any size, was suicidally dangerous. Detonating one was the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb in the centre of a planet, and the Oblivion continuum power generators that used captured wormholes to provide power, if they exploded it would bleed whatever was unlucky to get in the way to bleed into another dimension.

" We know, but you haven't heard the punchline." Romana growled. " Rassilon claimed the Time Lords would ascend, to become creatures of consciousness alone. Free of time and cause and effect, ignoring the fact we were destroying the cosmos to save only one race."

" That's obsene," Martha breathed.

" We know, and I had to stop them." The Doctor looked down at this. " Romana and I had been separated for a long time, so I don't know what happened her end, but when I heard the news, I decided enough was enough."

" During my time at the Academy, there was this kid, this girl who was a prodigy, and she once disappeared for a week. No-one could find her, but when she came back, she would not tell a soul where she'd been and what she'd done. She buried herself in something, and when she emerged, she put a telepathic message into my mind, saying one day, go to this place. Then she committed suicide."

" Oh my god," Martha put a hand to her mouth.

The Doctor carried on. " When the time came, the message clicked in my head. I saw everything, at last, what she'd seen. She'd entered the Time war, saw what our people had become, and prepared for it. She'd created a device that combined a time lock with a time loop which ran into a perpetual paradox where the Time Lords would exist for a certain amount of time, created the vortex and gave rise to the memories implanted into various races, but then would be forgotten without having existed, and never escape. It was called the Moment. I managed to save a few things before I connected it to the Eye of Harmony. The temporal energies released during the war made the Moment possible, and soon the Time war was closed off. But Gallifrey was destroyed in the blast when the Eye began converting planets into antimatter. It wasn't deliberate, but it helped the creation of the Moment by providing a colossal amount of energy.

" I managed to reach the TARDIS, and I escaped. The blast wave hurled me into the vortex, somehow, one way or another I was able to guide the TARDIS away from Gallifrey, but I began to regenerate. I didn't have time to adjust to my new body when it finished. I was out of it, my TARDIS was a wreck and I was in a new body with new other Time Lord, or so I thought," he cast a meaningful look at Romana. " I didn't even realise the Chameleon arch was on my head, not until it was too late. When I felt myself being pushed into the watch, I couldn't fight it. I spent years in the watch. My mind lived inside a virtual environment to stop me from getting bored, but I wanted my body back. I'm still adjusting to it now." The Doctor raised his hands up to look at them.

" I don't recognise these hands," he whispered after a moment. " I still think my body's in its Eighth incarnation, but its not."

" How did you stand being in the watch?" Romana asked; if her experience from being hunted by the Family was the same as the Doctor's, then she'd feel pure sympathy.

The Doctor closed his eyes, and his fists. " I wanted to get out," he whispered. " I hated it, Romana. Being locked out of my body, and I'd only just regenerated. I spent most of my days screaming, pleading for someone like Chantho or Magister, and that was before I learnt he was the Master, to hear me, to let me out."

Romana nodded. That was exactly how she'd felt. Those fob watches were not designed for comfort. There may not have been dimensions within the watch, but it felt like a prison to Romana when she'd hidden from the Family. She'd been more than delighted to escape like wisps of smoke when Tim Latimer opened it.

" How did you survive?" The Doctor asked her curiously.

Romana sighed. " The Eye of Harmony created earthquakes, and the Daleks were closing in for a final push. Our people had forgotten their savagery, and they were panic stricken. In the confusion, I reached a TARDIS bay where I selected my TARDIS, an unprimed Mark 5, and prepared to make my escape. A Dalek transported close by, and shot me. It was a fleeting blow, but it was painful. I could feel the regeneration begin I set the controls for a random destination, priming the TARDIS, and I escaped. I regenerated just as Gallifrey exploded." She shuddered.

* * *

An hour later, the Doctor was walking slowly towards the room Romana had taken for her own. She hadn't been very happy to learn her previous room, the one she'd taken during her time with him in his Fourth incarnation, had been deleted, but she'd adapted.

He had to tell her, it wasn't fair to keep what he had secret from her...

He reached the door and knocked on it.

The door opened. Romana stood inside, wearing a sheer dark blue satin nightdress. The Doctor swallowed as he gazed at her as a part of his body responded.

Romana smirked when she saw the reaction, her eyes dropping downwards before looking up at him with barely contained lust, and acting on instinct she pulled him in, wrapping her arms around his neck and started to kiss him. She moved her pelvis closer to his own, and she began rubbing. The Doctor pushed her away regretfully, though he truly wanted to just give in but he couldn't. Not just yet. Romana looked hurt.

" What's wrong?" She asked. " I thought we were going to-"

" Later," the Doctor whispered, reaching out to rest his hands on her hips and pull her towards him. He kissed her forehead. " I need to show you something."

Romana frowned, but she followed the Doctor out of her room. They walked towards the cloister room, and when they got to the doors, the Doctor simply touched them to open them.

Standing in the doorway, he pointed.

Romana followed his pointed arm with a frown, and gasped.

**Author's note. Cliffhanger. But the clue is close by.**

**Anyway, I know I didn't mention the fall of Arcadia, but I wanted to get to what mattered the most, not individual battles.**


End file.
